THE 
ITED STATES 

AJMIER.ICA. 

I 

wk the Civil *K 

MUZZEY 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

llllllllll 



Qass. 
Book. 



THE UNITED STATES 
OF AMERICA 



I 

THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR 



BY 



DAVID SAVILLE MUZZEY, Ph.D. 

BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK CITY 




GINN AND COMPANY 

BOSTON . NEW YORK • CHICAGO • LONDON 
ATLANTA • DALLAS • COLUMBUS • SAN FRANCISCO 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY DAVID SAVILLE MUZZEY 
ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
330.4 



GINN AND COMPANY . PRO- 
PRIETORS . BOSTON . U.S.A. 



PREFACE 



This book is intended primarily for college students. It aims 
at something beyond that mere chronicling of the facts of the 
past in fuller detail which often makes the advanced" history 
text only the elementary book ^Vrit large." In other branches 
of study there is progression. The writer on calculus or me- 
chanical engineering does not feel it incumbent upon him to 
restate and explain simple mathematical processes, like factor- 
ing or the extraction of cube root. He takes the knowledge of 
these things for granted. But historians are often content to 
repeat over and over again the same succession of names and 
dates, instead of attempting to interpret their meaning to ma- 
turing minds. This is what gives so many students the impres- 
sion that history is a discipline of memory of past events^ and 
the content of history a museum of wax figures in no vital rela- 
tion to the society of today. Obviously, unless the historian 
can show that the men and institutions of the past have that 
inevitable parental relation to present social and political struc- 
tures which the biologist, for example, traces in the develop- 
ment of physical life, history will continue to be remote, unreal, 
and unrelated. 

As a succession of happenings the past, even the most recent 
past, is forever gone. It is as far beyond our reach as the 
moons of Jupiter. It is behind our back, too. The entire and 
increasing work of our life is the unceasing creation of a future 
with our present materials — as in the case of the traveler who 
lays the corduroy road ahead of him log by log. Because our 
present material is the heritage of the long past, that past has 
eternal significance in determining the direction of the road 
which we lay. 

Such is the spirit in which this book has been written. Its 
subject is the development of the American ideal of democracy, 

iii 



iv 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



or self-government in freedom. Without overlooking or slight- 
ing the economic factors in that development, the author has 
avoided the temptation to give them the overemphasis which 
is rather the fashion today. Our age is confessedly an age of 
material exploitation. But the things in which people are most 
absorbed for the moment (and generations are but moments for 
the historian) are by no means necessarily the most important 
things for a people. If the pendulum of interest has swung so 
far to the economic side that it is considered more ^'up-to-date" 
to dwell on the origins of the oil industry than on the origins of 
the Jeffersonian Democracy, or to tabulate the rise and fall of 
our exports and imports more carefully than the rise and fall 
of the spirit of civic responsibihty, it is an imperative duty 
of the historian to redress the balance. Our destiny is not the 
making of money, but the making of America. Our heritage of 
political ideals is a far richer possession than our heritage of 
material resources ; for if the ideals be lost or obscured, all the 
treasures of field, factory, and mine cannot avail to save us 
from the fate of Nineveh or Rome. 

Service to the student has been the author's sole preoccupa- 
tion in the preparation of this book. Experts in American his- 
tory will detect on every page indebtedness to former laborers 
in the field, and will, it is hoped, discover a faithful adherence 
to reliable sources. If quotation marks abound, it is because 
the author has wished to let the actors themselves tell a large 
part of the story in their own words. 

DAVID SAVILLE MUZZEY 

Columbia Uniyersity, New York 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 

PAGE 

The Settlements i 

British Control in the Colonies . 20 

The Expulsion of the French 34 

CHAPTER II. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

British Provocation 55 

The Declaration of Independence 71 

War and Peace 84 

CHAPTER III. FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 

The Confederation 104 

Anarchy Imminent 116 

The Constitution 133 

CHAPTER IV. WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 

The Hamiltonian System 148 

Foreign Entanglements 167 

The Downfall of Federalism 185 

CHAPTER V. THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 

The Louisiana Purchase 204 

The Struggle for Neutrality 224 

The War of 181 2 252 

CHAPTER VI. THE NEW NATIONALISM 

Expansion — Political, Industrial, and Territorial .... 283 

The Missouri Compromise and the Monroe Doctrine . . . 309 

Sectional Rivalry 329 

V 



vi THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

PAGE 

CHAPTER VII. ''THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 

The New Democracy 348 

Nullification 367 

The Triumph of the Whigs 382 

CHAPTER VHI. THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 

Tyler and Texas 403 

The Mexican War . 421 

The Compromise of 1850 443 

CHAPTER IX. THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 

The Business Man's Peace 466 

The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise 483 

Secession 503 

CHAPTER X. THE CIVIL WAR 

The Resort to Arms 529 

The Field of Battle 551 

Government and People in War Time 592 

BIBLIOGRAPHY i 

INDEX xxvii 



LIST OF MAPS 

PAGE 

Colonial Grants and Actual Settlements in the Seventeenth Century 4 



The Encircling French 35 

Drift toward Royal Control in the Colonies, 1682-1752 .... 39 

North America at the Close of the French Wars 53 

The Revolutionary War in the Central Atlantic States, 1776-1778 87 

The Revolutionary War in the West and South, 17 78-1 781 ... 95 

The United States by the Treaty of 1783 loi 

The Surrender of Western Claims by the States, 1 780-1802 (In 

color) 114 

The United States at the Close of Jefferson's Administration (In 

color) 244 

The War of 18 12 on the Canadian Border 261 

The War of 181 2 on the Sea 265 

Projects for New Western States in the Revolutionary Epoch , . 291 

The Trans-Mississippi Country and the Missouri Compromise . . 319 

The Mexican War and the Mexican Cession 425 

The United States by the Compromise of 1850 (In color) , , . 456 



The Presidential Election of i860 519a, 519b 

The United States in the Period of the Civil War 550 

The War in the Mississippi Valley 559 

The War in Eastern Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania , , . 585 



vii 



THE UNITED STATES OF 
AMERICA 



CHAPTER I 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 
/ shall yet live to see it an Inglishe Nation. — Sir Walter Raleigh 

The Settlements 

In the fourscore and six years that elapsed between the cere- 
monious advent of the first James Stuart to the English throne 
and the unceremonious departure therefrom of his grandson, 
the second James Stuart, a number of English settlements 
were planted on the Atlantic coast of North America from the 
Penobscot River in Maine to the Ashley and Cooper Rivers 
in South Carolina. Only along the New England shore was 
the border of settlements continuous, comprising near the 
close of the seventeenth century some 75,000 inhabitants, a 
third of the population of the colonies. Below the harbor of 
New York the coast was still a wilderness of forest, dune, and 
swamp, except for a few scattered families where Delaware and 
Chesapeake Bays joined the ocean, an ill-nourished colony of 
Virginian malcontents who had drifted down the shore of Albe- 
marle Sound to the mouth of the Roanoke, and a group of late- 
comers three hundred miles further to the south around the 
pleasant waters of Charleston's rivers and bay. New York, 
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and 
the Carolinas, so far as these names represented actual com- 
munities of settlers and not vast and indeterminate tracts of 
Indian wilderness granted by the Stuarts, consisted of less than 
150,000 people living at forts and trading-posts, on plantations, 



X 



2 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



or in flourishing commercial towns along the easily navigable 
Hudson and the lower courses of the rivers emptying into the 
two great bays of the middle Atlantic coast. 

The overwhelming majority of the settlers, practically all in 
the colonies founded before the Stuart Restoration of 1660 
(Virginia, New England, Maryland), were Englishmen. Still, 
the process had already begun which was to make America the 
melting-pot of the nations. "^Imost at the same moment that he 
granted the Virginia charters James I started the Plantation of 
Ulster in northern Ireland (1611), a scheme for replacing the 
Roman Catholic natives by Protestant tenants under the pro- 
prietorship of absentee nobles and London merchants. The 
tenants were recruited chiefly from the Presbyterians of the 
Lowlands of Scotland, whose industry and thrift built a colony 
of a million or more inhabitants in Ulster before the close of the 
seventeenth century. But their prosperity and their Presby- 
terianism alike became an offense in the eyes of the Stuarts. 
They were persecuted for their nonconformity to the Anglican 
Church, and their exports of cattle, wool, and linen were sub- 
jected to heavy duties to protect English merchants and manu- 
facturers. Suffering under these burdens, the Scotch-Irish 
began to emigrate to the new land of promise. At first only 
a few hundred came to Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the 
Carolinas; but with the eighteenth century the migration 
quickened, and the Scotch-Irish poured into the valleys of the 
Appalachian range from Pennsylvania to Georgia, forming the 
sturdy advance guard of the American pioneers — our first 
frontiersmen. No other non-English stock furnished so large 
a quota to our colonial immigration or exercised so powerful 
an influence on the development of our national life as these 
exiled exiles from the northern counties of Ireland. Their sons 
founded our first states west of the Alleghenies. The roll call 
of their descendants includes the names of Stark, Knox, 
McClellan, McKinley, Greeley, Motley, Rutledge, Jackson, 
and Calhoun. 

From the continent of Europe also came settlers to enrich 
and diversify American life. Dutchmen and Swedes were 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



3 



established on the banks of the Hudson and the Delaware 
several decades before those streams became the North River 
and the South River respectively of the Duke of York's 
province (1664). The religious wars and persecutions of the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Germany, France, and 
the "Netherlands led to considerable displacement of population 
and resulted in voluntary or enforced migrations whose waves 
reached even the shores of the New World. From Germany, 
Bohemia, and Hungary came Anabaptists, the radicals of the 
Protestant Reformation, who carried religious dissent to its 
logical conclusion in pure individualism, rebelling against the 
authority of a Protestant magistrate no less than against that 
of a Catholic bishop, rejecting all forms and ceremonies in 
worship, and insisting on personal holiness of life — pledged 
in adult baptism — as the irremissible condition of member- 
ship in the church of Christ. From the Rhenish Palatinate 
came Calvinists, driven from their homes by the merciless 
devastations of that fairest of the provinces of Germany by the 
generals of Louis XIV, the inexorable Turenne and the brutal 
Louvois (1674, 1689). From France came Huguenots, mem- 
bers of the valuable industrial groups of ironworkers, paper- 
makers, tanners, and silk-weavers whom Louis XIV's dragoons 
hunted out of the cities in the enforcement of the culminat- 
ing folly of his reign, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes 
(1685). These, with a few Welshmen, Jews, Finns, and Poles, 
infused a strain of foreign blood into all the colonies, though 
they were most numerous in Pennsylvania, the Jerseys, and 
the Carolinas, where the proprietors were anxious to secure 
settlers. William Penn even advertised his colony widely on the 
continent by translations into Dutch and German of a prospec- 
tus entitled ^^Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania 
— made Publick for the information of such as are or may be 
disposed to transport Themselves or Servants into those Parts " 
(1681). He had his returns in the sale of 15,000 acres of land 
to a group of Frankfort Pietists, and the foundation two years 
later by German mechanics and weavers of the new ^'city of 
Germantown or Germanopolis," 




Colonial Grants and Actual Settlements in the Seventeenth 

Century 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



5 



Naturally these Scotch-Irish, German, and French settlers, 
seeking an asylum from religious and political persecution in 
the Old World, would furnish little encouragement in the New 
World to schemes for the imposition of an autocratic govern- 
ment or an orthodox faith upon the colonists. Their contribu- 
tion to liberty and democracy in America was consistent and 
constant. They were readily assimilated to the English settlers, 
because an essential identity of interest brought them here. 
America was for them, as it has been for the millions of immi- 
grants who have followed them, the land of opportunity in 
industry, of immunity from persecution, of community of 
political life. 

Foreign immigrants, however, formed but a small fraction of 
the colonial life of America. It was English institutions — not 
German, French, or Dutch — that were permanently trans- 
planted to the New World : English language, law, administra- 
tion, letters, customs, and liberties. To the mother country, 
then, which sent out its tens of thousands to the new land, we 
must look for the motives and conditions that determined the 
early American settlements. To analyze these motives and 
conditions fully would be to write the history of England in the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was a part of England 
that came to America, a part determined both by England's 
relations to the continent of Europe and by the interplay of 
classes, parties, and sects within England itself. Let us pass 
in review some of the more conspicuous of the motives and 
circumstances of colonial migration: commercial rivalry with 
Spain, industrial conditions in England, opposition to the polit- 
ical system of the Stuarts, and the desire for liberty of belief 
and worship. 

One of the most significant features of that slow change from 
the medieval and feudal Europe of the fourteenth century to 
the modern and nationalistic Europe of the sixteenth century 
which is generally miscalled a renaissance" was the shift- 
ing of the routes of trade from the Mediterranean and the in- 
land cities of Europe to the Atlantic littoral. Venice, Genoa, 
Amalfi, Augsburg, Cologne, Marseilles, Lyons, and Ghent were 



6 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



succeeded as marts of trade by Cadiz, Lisbon, Dieppe, London, 
Bristol, and Antwerp. The third stage of water-borne com- 
merce was at hand. As the age of classical antiquity was 
ushered in by the substitution of landlocked sea commerce for 
the old river commerce of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Eu- 
phrates, so the modern age dawned with the widening of com- 
merce to the great oceans. The three navigable oceans of the 
world were all crossed for the first time by European explorers 
in the single generation between 1492 and 1522. 

The happy position of Spain and Portugal at the junction of 
the IMediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, and their 
proximity to the coast of Africa, along which the earliest lines 
of oceanic traffic ran, gave to the countries of the Iberian 
peninsula an early start in the new field of distant discovery 
and exploration. That the}^ were not slow to seize that advan- 
tage is shown by their arbitrary division of the whole unex- 
plored world between them at the close of the fifteenth century. 
The next centur}^, however, saw the rapid rise of England and 
Holland as commercial powers in sharp rivalry with Spain and 
Portugal. The Elizabethan seamen who chased Spanish treas- 
ure ships among the islands of the West Indies and even into 
the very harbors of Spain were doubtless obeying the impulse 
of the buccaneer, but they were none the less laying the founda- 
tions of England's colonial empire. The earhest settlers who 
came to Jamestown and scores of the New England immigrants 
of the following decades had shared in the jubilation over the 
defeat of the Spanish Armada, which ^'ennobled many coasts 
with the wrecks of noble ships" (1588). They remembered 
from their boj^hood days how gorgeous Queen Elizabeth had 
knighted Francis Drake on the quarter-deck of his brave ship, 
the Golden Hind, just returned from a voyage round the world, 
laden with the priceless treasures of plundered Spanish galleons 
(1580) ; or even recalled the storm of mingled dismay and in- 
dignation which swept over England when the Pope at the 
solicitation of the Spanish court launched his bull of deposition 
against their queen (1570). The Elizabethan seamen had the rare 
opportunity of serving both God and mammon by despoiUng 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



7 



wliat they called "the papistical Spaniard." The Virginia 
settlement of 1607 was not only a commercial venture but a 
blow at Spain's power, as was amply proved by the behavior 
of the latter country. On more than one occasion she sent ships 
into the James River, hoping to break up the settlement. 
A Spanish captain seized the John and Mary on her way to 
Virginia in 1620, loaded with colonists and supplies. And the 
Spanish ambassador in London was busy in season and out of 
season sowing discord among the members of the Virginia Com- 
pany and poisoning the mind of King James against them with 
hints of "seditious" practices. 

Less romantic, but no less compelling, were the economic 
motives which led to the English migrations of the seventeenth 
century. The national states which rose on the ruins of feu- 
dalism needed money above everything else. Political adminis- 
tration, commercial regulation, military defense, broadened out 
from municipal and local limits to a national scale ; and with 
the process grew the need for a large civil service, for judicial 
and financial departments of state, for armies and fleets. The 
national treasuries were taxed to the utmost. Credit and fund- 
ing systems were not yet in operation, the banks of Amsterdam 
and London not yet in existence. Actual money — gold and 
silver — was indispensable for running the state. Great quan- 
tities of the precious metals were taken from the mines of 
America by the Spaniards, and England diverted as much as 
possible of this treasure to her own coffers, either by the direct 
method of seizing the Spanish ships or by the indirect method 
of multiplying the output of her industries for the Spanish 
market. 

The increase of gold and silver in the realm brought with it 
a rise in prices and rents which bore hard on the workingman 
and the farmer. Severe statutes held the laborer to work at 
wages fixed by the justices of the peace, under penalty of im- 
prisonment or forced service if he refused. The harsh poor- 
laws and vagrancy laws of Elizabeth's reign show that the 
land was filled with "valiant rogues and sturdy beggars." As 
the farms were turned into sheep pastures, under the double 



8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



impetus of mounting rents and a widening wool market, the 
peasant class had to bear the poverty and distress that always 
accompanies an economic readjustment. The hands that had 
guided the plow were often idle a long time before they learned 
to operate the loom. Besides, with the closing of the monas- 
teries, and the appropriation of their lands to endow the new 
nobility of Henry VIII, the mildest landlords in the kingdom 
had been dispossessed, and the chief comfort, charity, and 
asylum for the poor had been withdrawn. 

When historians speak of the "overpopulation" of England 
in the seventeenth century as one of the causes of the colonizing 
movement, it is this economic condition that they really mean. 
It seems ridiculous to call the England of James I overpopu- 
lated, when the whole realm contained little more than half the 
number of inhabitants that the city of London does today. The 
distress arose not from England's crowding but from a radical 
disturbance in the scale of values. Luxury and extravagance, 
of which we begin to hear much in the "spacious days of great 
Elizabeth," brought their inevitable complement of poverty and 
squalor. "This land grows weary of her inhabitants, soe as man 
is heer of less price among us than a horse or a sheep," wrote 
John Winthrop, the leader of the Puritan migration to Massa- 
chusetts in 1630; and he continues, "We stand here striving 
for space of habitation . . . and in ye mean tyme suffer a 
whole continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man 
to waste without any improvement." Shall we wonder that 
hundreds of able-bodied men preferred the hold of the emigrant 
ship, with freedom and opportunity at the end of the voyage, 
to a foul cell in a debtor's prison with renewed misery on 
their release! 

When the prospectus of a colonizing company or the induce- 
ments of the shippers' agents failed to secure enough emigrants 
to people the colony, the government came to the aid of the 
proprietors by granting them permission to seize vagabonds, 
paupers, and criminals to take out to the plantations. King 
James I wrote a letter to the treasurer and council of the Vir- 
ginia Company in 1619, commanding them to send to Virginia 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



9 



a hundred "dissolute persons which the knight-marshall should 
deliver to them.'^ A commission was appointed in 1633 to res- 
cue from the clutches of the jailer persons convicted of certain 
crimes and to "bestow them to be used in the discoveries and 
other foreign employment." Soon after the restoration of 
Charles II (1660) transportation to the colonies was made the 
legal penalty for some crimes. Even as late as 1 722 we find the 
Virginia legislature vainly striving to stop the importation of 
criminals. But the deleterious effect on the colonies of this 
migration of the "scum of England" has been much exagger- 
ated. Comparatively few jailbirds and paupers came, and of 
those few the greater part were made over into diligent and self- 
respecting farmers and laborers by their strenuous life in the 
New World/ 

The urge of adventure, commercial rivalry, and economic 
pressure were general stimulants to colonial migration, but the 
steady trend of the Stuart government toward poHtical abso- 
lutism and religious coercion gave that migration its peculiar 
character of self-reliance. The Stuart absolutism was the at- 
tempt to extend a medieval system of government into an age 
which was rapidly becoming modern, an age in which there was 
emerging a bourgeois, or middle, class, enriched by manufac- 
ture, farming, and trade, which broke up the old social frame- 
work of noble, priest, and peasant. History from the days of 
Solon to the days of Disraeli has demonstrated the truth that a 
share in political power cannot be permanently denied to a class 
that has acquired wealth. But the Stuart kings had little re- 
gard for the lessons of history. They proclaimed themselves 
"God's lieutenants on earth" and declared their prerogative 
"a mystery of state" and "a transcendant matter." They held 
themselves in no wise responsible to the people of England for 
the exercise of their powers. The Parliament they regarded as 

lA peculiar form of colonial immigrant was the "indentured servant" or 
" redemptioner," who, in order to pay for his passage to America, sold his serv- 
ices for a term of years (often seven) and so became a sort of temporary slave. 
Professor John R. Commons reckons that half the English who came to the col- 
onies were redemptioners. 



lO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



a group of committees, only meeting when the sovereign gra- 
ciously deigned to summon them, and dispersing at his order. 
The sovereign undoubtedly had the weight of tradition on his 
side, for the crown was the power around which the institutions 
of England had grown. It antedated the House of Commons by 
centuries. But already before the death of Queen Elizabeth 
the Commons were growing restive under strict royal patronage 
and tutelage. They dared to speak their minds openly, while 
the queen scolded them with tears of rage in her eyes, ^'Ye 
durst not have treated my royal father so ! " With chivalrous 
memory of the great things their queen had done for England, 
the Commons forebore to press the quarrel. 

But when the half-foreign dynasty of the Stuarts came to the 
throne the quarrel broke out. Danger from the Spaniard was 
past. Commercial wealth was multiplying wonderfully in the 
land. The extravagance of the court made increasing demands 
on the national purse. The Commons, recruited more and more 
from the representatives of the new prosperity, resented the 
thinly veiled tone of contempt in which the king addressed them, 
criticized him for his subserviency to a worthless set of courtiers, 
and made their grants of money contingent on the guarantee of 
privileges which they claimed were as old as Magna Carta. 
After a quarter of a century of wrangling over taxes and privi- 
leges, during which seven Parliaments were called in desperation 
and dismissed in anger, the king decided to do without a Parlia- 
ment altogether. For eleven years ( 162 9-1 640) Charles I ruled 
England with the advice and support of his courtiers alone, 
squeezing the necessary revenues from a reluctant people by 
every device discoverable by ingenious lawyers and servile offi- 
cials, improvising fines for new offenses, reviving feudal dues 
long obsolete, and even confiscating the private property of his 
subjects under the fiction of a loan to the state. 

It was exactly during the years from the opening of James I's 
quarrel with Parliament to the close of Charles I's experi- 
ment in personal government (i 604-1 640) that the foundations 
of the American nation were laid. In those years the two colo- 
nies of Virginia and Massachusetts, which in a large measure 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



II 



established political and social precedents for all the later settle- 
ments, were planted and took on a character which was to dis- 
tinguish them down to the American Revolution. By 1 640 these 
colonies had each received about 15,000 emigrants from the 
homeland, — not landed nobles, royal judges, courtiers, and offi- 
cials, who were the natural champions of the Stuart prerogative, 
but men of the middle class, enterprising, inquiring, innovating 
people, to whom the spectacle of a rich and developing state 
serving the whim of an irresponsible monarch seemed an anach- 
ronism. They were the political misfits of England. 

They were religious misfits also. Puritanism and ^'independ- 
ency,'' religious and political dissent, went hand in hand. It 
was impossible that the children of the Reformation should re- 
ject the authority of Pope and prelate without questioning that 
of king and lord. Protestants who had fled from England during 
the persecutions of Mary the Catholic, in the middle of the six- 
teenth century, returned from Frankfort, Basel, Strassburg, and 
Geneva under Elizabeth's milder rule, imbued with the indi- 
vidualism of Calvin's theology. The habit of dissent from es- 
tablished forms of religion grew, in spite of acts of uniformity 
and threats of persecution. Under Elizabeth the Puritan lay- 
men and lesser ministers were not seriously disturbed, but when 
James Stuart began his reign by rejecting their petition for 
freedom of worship and declaring that he would make them con- 
form to the Anglican Church ''or harry them out of the land,'* 
the emigration began It became an exodus during the decade 
of the personal government of Charles I, when Archbishop Laud 
of Canterbury, with relentless dihgence, exacted conformity in 
faith and ritual, conceiving the Church, as Gardiner says, "not 
as the temple of the Holy Ghost, but as the palace of an invisible 
king." Several thousand Puritans came to New England in the 
"great migration" of those years, while Roman Catholics sought 

^Even Virginia, which was founded as a commercial venture, and which is gen- 
erally contrasted with the New England settlements for conscience' sake, narrowly 
missed being a refuge for Puritans. Only a year after its foundation a number 
of Puritans preparing to migrate thither were, through Archbishop Bancroft's 
influence, forbidden by King James to leave the realm without his permission. 



12 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



refuge in Lord Baltimore's new colony. We have already 
seen how the religious persecutions on the Continent in the 
seventeenth century sent French Huguenots, German Pietists, 
and Moravian brethren from the devastated Palatinate of the 
Rhine to add their strain of nonconforming blood to the popu- 
lation of the proprietary colonies of New York, New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas. 

It is impossible, of course, to say in exactly what proportion 
the motives of commercial adventure, economic pressure, polit- 
ical protest, and religious dissent were mixed in the emigrants 
of the seventeenth century. The same John Winthrop who 
thought it a shame "to suffer a whole continent to lie waste with- 
out any improvement," and was himself "soe shortened" in his 
estate as not to be able "to keep sail with his equals," and who 
saw in the arbitrary sway of Charles I a sign that God 
would "bring some heavy e Affliction upon this land and that 
speedylye," asserted that the chief reason for going to New 
England was to carry the gospel into America and "erect a bul- 
wark against the kingdom of Anti-Christ." It is evident, how- 
ever, that any of these motives singly or all together would 
produce a society in which courage, endurance, self-reliance, 
equality of opportunity, and jealousy of privilege would be 
conspicuous traits ; and these traits, inherent in the very nature 
of the emigrants from the Old World, would only be brought 
into clearer relief by transplantation to the new home, where 
life was arduous, dangerous, unvaried, and singularly exposed 
to the inquisitorial judgment of one's neighbor. 

Much has been written about the social and political contrasts 
between the colonial groups: the Puritan self-governing com- 
munities of New England, with the town as the unit of political 
organization, with Church and school the outstanding social 
institutions, and petty farming and extensive commerce the chief 
industrial pursuits ; the Cavalier population of the South, with 
its broad tobacco plantations, its Episcopalian aristocracy, and 
its constant social commerce with England ; the middle group 
of colonies, cosmopolitan in blood, varied in religion, contentious 
in government, and keen for trade. These contrasts doubtless 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



13 



existed and played an important part in the development of 
the colonies. But far more important than the contrasts were the 
similar tendencies and common conditions of colonial life. The 
distance of the settlements from England, their virtual inde- 
pendence of continuous control by the home government, the 
need of finding their own resources for the development of the 
new land and often for defense against the Indians, — all served 
to intensify in the whole body of colonists the radical traits of 
the original settlers.^ Radicalism in England was a mere epi- 
sode in the turbulent history of the seventeenth century; in 
America it rapidly became a tradition. Even Oliver Crom- 
well condemned the leveling politics" and religious anarchy 
of Rhode Island. 

The things in which the colonists agreed, then, were far more 
significant than the things in which they differed. They spoke 
the same language, they preserved and adapted to their own 
use the same common law,^ they brought the same traditions of 
political evolution — Magna Carta, the control of the purse, 
Habeas Corpus, and the criticism of royal ministers. It was not 
alone in Massachusetts, whose entire colonial history was an 
apprenticeship in the art of independence, that the birthright of 
Englishmen was cherished. Virginia began soon after its foun- 
dation to concern itself with the preservation of its freedom. 
The last House of Burgesses that met before the surrender of 
the charter to the king (1624) decreed that no tax should be 
laid on the colony without its consent, nor money spent without 

^The English government never made the colonies a paternal concern, as did 
the European states. The king granted rights, but left to the corporations and 
proprietors the expense of exploration and settlement. There were no English 
fleets, like the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish, to convey colonial commerce ; 
and even the English officials appointed by the crown to the colonies depended 
for their salaries, with few exceptions, on freely elected assemblies. 

2 Not only during the colonial period but even far down into our national 
history it was recognized that the English common law was in force in America. 
"Let an Englishman go where he will," said an English authority in 1720, "he 
carries as much of law and liberty with him as the nature of things will bear." 
And in 1815 Justice Story, of the United States Supreme Court, wrote, "We 
take it to be a dear principle that the common law in force at the emigration 
pf our ancestors is deemed the birthright of the colonies." 



14 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



its authorization. A few years later (1635) the Virginians 
deposed the king's governor, John Harvey, and sent him back to 
England, — an act called by Charles II ^'an assumption of royal 
power." A few years later still (1652), when Oliver Cromwell 
had sent over a warship to demand the surrender of the province 
to Parliament, the Burgesses drew up a ^'treaty" with him in 
which they declared that their submission was ^Woluntary," and 
demanded a guarantee of free speech, free trade, and exemption 
from all taxes not granted by their own body. If the Virginians 
of the Restoration and the Hanoverian period were attached to 
their king, their aristocracy, and their church, that attachment 
never meant servility. When it came to the choice between their 
interests and their attachment they were ready to sacrifice the 
latter. The early history of the relations of the proprietors to 
their settlers in INIaryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the 
Carolinas furnishes many examples of the same spirit of jeal- 
ousy of executive encroachments. ^'Among other detestable 
ills," wTOte George Chalmers of London, in 1780, ^'the American 
climate seems always to have begotten a propensity to dis- 
obedience." Edmund Burke had said five years before in 
Parliament that the Americans were animated by a fierce spirit 
of liberty." 

The economic and social life of the colonists was that of a 
frontier community. They were a sparse population in a wide 
land and a poor population on a virgin land. The forest and the 
Indian, the rocky soil of the New England coast, and the 
swamps and jungles of the South were the obstacles against 
which they had to contend. The earty years in most of the 
colonies were a time of great hardship and privation, establish- 
ing the tradition that it was a sifted people, ^'picked out by a 
strange contrivance of God," who were the founders of the 
American nation. There were no manufactures to gather the 
people into cities, for land was abundant and cheap, while labor 
was scarce and dear. Boston, the largest town of the seven- 
teenth century, was a fishing-port and a mart of trade with the 
West Indies and the Old World. In New England generally the 
people were gathered in little communities seldom reaching a 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROL'ND 



thousand souls. The land was divided among the farmers in 
small holdings, and community life, as it centered in the town 
meeting and the church, was intensely vigorous and critical. 
In Virginia the early devotion of the colony to the growing of 
tobacco, in spite of the efforts of the king and the company to 
foster a more wholesome and varied production, led to the 
occupation of large tracts of land by the planters and made im- 
possible the establishment of the town, with its local democratic 
features of meetinghouse and public school. On court days" 
the squires would ride from miles around to the county seat and 
make a holiday with races, games, and flights of electioneering 
oratory. But a continuous round of meetings and classes was 
impossible in a region where one's neighbor's house was visible 
only through a field glass. The Virginia holdings averaged 450 
acres in the middle of the seventeenth century and over 900 
acres at the end of it, while patents of 20,000, 30,000, or even 
40,000 acres were not unknown. At the close of the Stuart 
period a few thousand planters in Virginia had title to lands 
equal in area to the whole of England. These estates descended 
from father to eldest son by right of primogeniture until the time 
of the American Revolution, and naturally engendered an aris- 
tocracy of untitled squires. The middle colonies, except for the 
great patroonships along the Hudson, corresponded more closely 
in economic structure to New England than to the Southern 
colonies. There was little tobacco culture ; the soil was glaci- 
ated ; farming was the common occupation of the mixed popu- 
lation, while the Hudson opened an artery for the valuable fur 
trade. The beaver became the emblem of New York, as the 
^'sacred codfish" did of Boston. 

The Puritan settlers of New England were keen for popular 
education. Harvard College was established six years after 
Winthrop's company landed, and a law of the Bay Colony, 
passed in 1649, provided that every town of fifty householders 
must furnish a teacher of reading and writing, and every town 
of one hundred families a grammar school preparing for the 
college, ^'to the end that Learning may not be buried in the 
graves of our fore Fathers in Church and Commonwealth, 



l6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the Lord assisting our Endeavors." But learning" for the New 
England Puritan was synonymous with theology. Intense as his 
intellectual life was, it was not so broad as that of the educated 
man of the Southern provinces. The explosive remark of an 
irritable old governor of Virginia, ^^I thank God there are no 
free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have them in 
a hundred years/' has been quoted again and again to prove that 
the Old Dominion was illiterate. But in spite of Governor 
Berkeley's deplorable piety of ignorance, William and Mary 
College was established in 1693, from whose halls have come 
four of the presidents of the United States. Addison, Pope, Con- 
greve, Steele, Beaumont, and Shakespeare graced the shelves of 
private libraries, which, like Colonel Byrd's of Westover, some- 
times ran into the thousands of volumes. Our French visitor 
the Duke of Rochefoucauld in 1795 thought that ^^a taste for 
reading was more prevalent among the gentlemen of the first 
class in Virginia than in any other part of America." The 
Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern at Williamsburg, where 
many of the early acts of the Revolution were planned, may 
share with Faneuil Hall of Boston the claim to be the ^'cradle 
of American liberty." Still, the public-school system, which 
spread from New England to the middle colonies, did not touch 
the region south of Mason and Dixon's line.^ It is only since 
the Civil War that the Southern states have grappled seriously 
with the problems of the free public school. 

Although the usual seventeenth-century idea of a Church 
established and maintained by the authority of the state pre- 
vailed in all of the colonies except Rhode Island and Pennsyl- 
vania, it was only in Massachusetts and Connecticut that 
religion was cherished with persecuting ardor and that the clergy 
became autocrats not only in questions of doctrine and morals 
but in practical politics as well. Perhaps the most deplorable 

iThe last royal governor of North Carolina (Martin) said that there were but 
two public schools in the colony in his day. The more prosperous colony of South 
Carolina had only three grammar schools in the eighteenth century. Noah 
Webster asserts that in 1785 Connecticut alone had a greater output of news- 
papers than all the states south of Mason and Dixon's line. 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



17 



chapters in our colonial annals are the grim but fascinating 
pictures of Puritan intolerance in which the common human 
passions and affections struggle to pierce the cold mists of a 
repellent Calvinism, like the veiled sun on a late November 
afternoon. The saints" of Massachusetts had nothing to learn 
from Archbishop Laud in ^'keeping the Lord's temple unde- 
filed." In a convention held at Newtown (Cambridge) only 
seven years after Winthrop's company arrived, they found 
eighty-two damnable errors and heresies" in the colony, which 
were punished with suitable whippings, fines, and imprison- 
ments. They banished clergymen who attempted to use the 
prayer book like bishops, those biting beasts and whelps of the 
Roman Htter, those knobs and wens and bunchy Popish flesh." 
They drove Roger Williams out into the snows of a New Eng- 
land winter to find a refuge among the more merciful Indians. 
They hanged Quakers on Boston Common and yielded to a 
perfect panic of persecuting zeal when a few poor old toothless, 
mumbling women were convicted of being the agents of Satan 
in bewitching the senses of the people of God. Nineteen persons 
were hanged and one old man was crushed to death under 
weights before the enormity of the witchcraft delusion was 
exorcised from the minds of the Massachusetts magistrates 
(1692). To understand the typical Puritan of seventeenth- 
century Boston one should read the diary of Judge Samuel 
Sewall, prominent in the witchcraft hunt though later repent- 
ing, and see him at his "awful but pleasing Christmas diversion" 
of arranging the coffins in the family vault, or deliberately 
driving his careless young son, by "strong representations of 
hell," into a terrified conviction of original sin, or pressing his 
third courtship with a slyly amorous pomposity. 

The Church of England was generally established in the 
colonies of the South, but religion was rather an amenity than 
a stern duty in those regions. The intense speculation and dog- 
matic interest and the inquisitorial guardianship of society 
which characterized Puritan New England were lacking. The 
Episcopal Church of Virginia and the Carolinas has been called 
with kindly humor "a gentlemen's club with a faint interest in 



1 8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

religion." The middle colonies showed a mingling of types in 
religion as in political and industrial life. Anglicanism came as 
far north as New York ; Puritanism went as far south as Mary- 
land. The two colonies which remained under the government 
of proprietors until the American Revolution (Maryland and 
Pennsylvania-Delaware) were founded as refuges for the two 
extreme forms of religious faith and worship: Maryland for 
the Roman Catholics, Pennsylvania for the Quakers. But the 
leveling influences of British trade and a varied immigration 
soon showed themselves in these colonies. Lord Baltimore had 
invited people of all religious faiths to come to his colony, forbid- 
ding only ^^unreasonable disputations on points of religion tend- 
ing to the disturbance of the public peace" ; and before the end 
of the seventeenth century the Catholics in his province were 
outnumbered by the Protestants more than two to one. Penn 
was forbidden by his charter to exclude Episcopalians from 
his province. But the prohibition was unnecessary, for the 
Quaker proprietor welcomed good men of every creed and prac- 
tice in religion. Even Roman Catholics, who were excluded 
from the colonies quite generally,^ were allowed in Pennsyl- 
vania, although the officials were scolded by the proprietor for 
^'suffering the scandal of the mass to be publickly celebrated." 

A visitor traveling through the colonies at the close of the 
seventeenth century would cross miles of wilderness by rude 
roads between little groups of settlements which formed the 
nuclei of our states. He would meet few fellow travelers, as 
his horse brushed the branches of encroaching maples or waded 
the muddy creeks, for such intercolonial trade as there was went 
by the coast waters. He would find a fairly homogeneous 
population of farmers, growing poorer and sparser as they 
pushed the first feeble wave of what was destined to be a mighty 

^Besides Maryland the only colonies that tolerated the Catholics were Rhode 
Island and Pennsylvania. The reason was political rather than dogmatic. The 
Catholics quite generally refused to take the oath to support the Protestant 
throne in England, against which the Pope had launched his anathema in the 
sixteenth century. The oath called for a disavowal of the Pope's act, which a 
good Catholic could not make. 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



10 



flood of westward migration against the foothills of the Alle- 
ghenies. He would discover that the pioneers of the ^'back 
country" were already of a somewhat hostile disposition to the 
richer merchants and planters of the coast region, who lent them 
money at high rates of interest and seemed singularly unrespon- 
sive to their efforts to extend the colony's territory. Still, the 
wide chasm that yawns in our present-day civilization between 
rich and poor he would not find. The slum-dweller and the 
multimillionaire were alike unknown to the seventeenth century, 
for the great industrial age which has gathered our people into 
the cities where the slums are bred and our capital into the hands 
of promoters of industry on a world scale had not yet dawned. 
He might see a "common scold" gagged and set in her own door- 
way as a warning to passers-by, or a youth having his tongue 
bored through with a hot skewer for swearing, or a criminal on 
the scaffold being terrorized by the minister's vivid description 
of the everlasting torture into which he would presently be 
launched as the noose tightened around his neck. For the age 
was not delicate in act or speech. In most of the colonies a score 
and more of crimes and sins were punishable by death, while the 
stocks, public whippings, brandings, and mutilations were the 
edifying chastisements for minor offenses. 

We look back on these early settlers of America as the found- 
ers of a nation, viewing their struggles and hardships, their first 
steps in self-government, their courageous challenge to the wil- 
derness, in the light of subsequent events which made us a free, 
united, democratic people. But if the Declaration of Independ- 
ence and the Constitution of the United States were latent in the 
Virginia assembly and the New England town meetings, the col- 
onists could not know it. They came to these shores with a much 
more modest purpose than the establishment of a mighty repub- 
Hc. They were groups of refugees seeking an asylum from 
religious coercion, or business adventurers seeking first the gold, 
gems, and silks of the Orient and falling into contentment with 
the more prosaic products of furs, fish, tobacco, lumber, and 
rice. They were the first Americans, but they were already 
Englishmen of the seventeenth century ; and in spite of all their 



20 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



quarrel with the religious and political establishments of that 
century, they breathed its economic and social atmosphere. 
They were not liberal, tolerant, or humane, as we understand 
those words. Even in the colony in which Puritanism reigned 
supreme the logical results of Puritanism — political and social 
equahty — were far from being reahzed. During the first half- 
century of its existence the Massachusetts colony admitted 
only about one in five of its adult males to the political privi- 
leges of "freemen.'" Governor John Winthrop spoke of the 
''commons" and the "meaner sort" much as an EngHsh lord 
might have done, and John Cotton said that he did "not con- 
ceive that God did ordain democracy as a fit government either 
for Church or Commonwealth."^ 

But the fathers builded better than they knew. Separated by 
the wide ocean from the autocracies and aristocracies of the Old 
World, from its imposing ecclesiastical establishments and its 
incessant political rivalries, confronted with the stern practical 
tasks of building their new homes, of providing defense against 
the Indians, of devising forms of government and justice, of de- 
veloping lines of commerce, of assimilating newcomers of varied 
race and faith, the colonists learned gradually to lay aside the 
stiffness of manner and theory that characterized the English- 
man of the seventeenth century and became democratic, in- 
ventive, quick-witted, confident. They ceased to be Englishmen 
and became Americans. 

British Control in the Colonies 

Because the American colonies broke away from the mother 
country by armed revolution in the last quarter of the eighteenth 
century, it has been too common a practice among historians 
to regard the whole colonial period in the light of that event, 
representing England as a kind of stepmother endeavoring to 

1 Winthrop wrote to Thomas Hooker, the founder of the Connecticut colony, 
in 1638 advising against consulting the people at large in the government, ''quia 
the best part is always the least and of that best part the wiser part is always the 
lesser." Cotton found sanction in the Bible for life tenure for higher magistrates. 
The great mass of the inhabitants of Massachusetts, says Osgood, were mutes.'^ 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



21 



impose her harsh will on her reluctant adolescent children. This 
is an entire misconception of the situation. The colonies were 
part and parcel of the English state. Their settlers were in 
overwhelming majority EngHsh subjects, who carried with them 
the language, law, institutions, and traditions of England. If 
the colonies are called ^'foreign plantations" in the official lan- 
guage of the time, the adjective in the phrase is used in its Hteral 
sense of ^'distant,'' and not at all as a synonym of alien." They 
were not conquered provinces on whose inhabitants England 
was seeking to put the imprint of her civilization (as we are 
attempting to do in the Philippines, for example), but rather 
outlying parts of a nation that had just become very conscious 
of its unity. That the union between the colonies and the 
mother country was severed was due neither to deliberate op- 
pression nor to willful provocation on England's part, but rather 
to certain features in the government of England ; namely, the 
lack of developed organs of colonial administration, the stormy 
political history of the Stuart dynasty, and the prevalence of the 
so-called mercantile theory of trade. As the failure of England 
to secure and maintain effective control of the colonies is the 
basic fact of American history, we may profitably examine the 
causes of that failure. 

In accordance with the accepted doctrine of the age of dis- 
covery, mariners and explorers were in the king's service, and 
the lands which they might find were taken possession of in the 
name and for the use of the sovereign. So John Cabot's discovery 
of Labrador in 1497 constituted the title of the English crown to 
the whole continent of America.^ During the seventeenth 

^This was a principle on which the English acted consistently throughout 
our colonial history. In 1623 they complained of the Dutch established on the 
Hudson as "interlopers." The charter of Charles II to the Duke of York in 1664, 
granted as " unoccupied territory " land that had been settled by the Dutch for 
fifty years. The French governor of Canada, anticipated by Dongan in the 
occupation of the upper Hudson, complained that "the king of England did 
grasp at all America." And Washington, in his embassy to the French com- 
manders in the wilderness of what is now western Pennsylvania (i7S3)j was 
ordered by Governor Dinwiddle of Virginia to warn them off of territory "so 
notoriously known to be the property of the crown of Great Britain." 



"22 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



century the Stuart kings parceled out the American coast to va- 
rious chartered companies or individual proprietors or boards of 
proprietors, granting them not only the right to the soil but also 
various powers of government. The king never meant that 
either soil or inhabitants should pass out of the control of the 
crown. Companies and proprietors exercised only a delegated 
authority. We have constant examples in the early history of 
the colonies of the interposition of the will of the king. He 
stopped emigrant vessels in the Thames, requiring the pas- 
sengers to take the oath of allegiance before saihng for America. 
He repeatedly sent commissioners to the colonies to carry his 
royal commands and to conduct investigations of the govern- 
ment. He ordered his law officers to bring action in the English 
courts to annul the charters of Virginia and Massachusetts, and 
even without the formality of a legal process resumed the 
powers of government which he had granted to Lord Baltimore 
and William Penn.^ 

But if the theory of the king's sovereignty in the colonies was 
complete, the exercise of it was far from perfect. Organs of 
administration were lacking both in the colonies and in England 
to maintain the authority of the crown. For fifty years and 
more after the settlement of Jamestown there was no permanent 
body or committee in the English state whose business it was 
to supervise the colonies; neither was there during that same 
half-century a single colony on the mainland of America (with 
the exception of Virginia after 1624) in which there was a single 
official appointed by the English crown and directly responsible 
thereto. From time to time under the early Stuarts (1603- 
1649) and the Interregnum (i 649-1 660) committees or boards 
of privy councilors, merchants or members of Parhament, were 
charged with colonial business. For example, a Council of Trade 
was appointed by James I in 1622 "to see how our laws do now 

1 William III, because of "great neglect and miscarriage in the government" 
of Pennsylvania, exposing the colony to danger from the French, put Penn's 
colony under the governor of New York for two years (1692-1694). Maryland, 
taken by the crown in 1690, was not restored until the fifth Lord Baltimore 
turned Protestant (1715). 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



23 



stand in force for prohibiting of merchandise to be carried in 
forraine bottoms." A commission of twelve privy councilors 
was created by Charles I in 1634 with most extensive power 
of protection and government" over the colonies^ including even 
the right to remove colonial governors and visit offenses against 
the king with the death penalty. A board of six lords and 
twelve commoners (including the great names of John Pym 
and Oliver Cromwell) was appointed by the Long Parlia- 
ment in 1643, with power to remove colonial officials. But 
the actual interference of these boards and committees with 
the affairs of the colonies was slight. Immersed in the tur- 
bulent stream of English politics, separated by the ocean 
from the American colonies, the councilors generally took the 
view expressed by an eighteenth-century writer that the ^'plan- 
tations were but inconsiderable and distant parcels" of the 
British domain. It was only on the eve of the American Revo- 
lution that a special department of state was created to deal 
with colonial affairs and Lord Hillsborough was placed at its 
head (1768). 

Parliament counted for next to nothing in the government of 
the colonies in the seventeenth century. For a full half of the 
time between James I's accession and the civil war it was not in 
session, and even when it was in session it was fully occupied in 
endeavoring to assert its rights against the Stuart prerogative. 
On the one or two occasions on which Parliament showed any 
inclination to interfere in colonial questions (for example, the 
control of the American fisheries in 162 1 or the investigation of 
the charges brought against Virginia in 1624) it was rebuked 
by the king and told that such matters were reserved exclusively 
for his privy council. The civil war brought the famous Long 
Parliament to the top for a few years, when an ambitious plan 
of colonial control was announced. But political and religious 
faction was so rife that Cromwell extinguished the liberties 
of Parliament as completely as either of his Stuart predeces- 
sors had done. With the Restoration of 1660 Parliament be- 
came an almost continuous body and began in earnest to enact 
laws for the regulation of colonial trade and to recommend 



24 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



investigations of colonial administration. But by that time the 
political habits of the colonies were fixed. 

During the whole of the seventeenth century the conflicting 
authorities of crown and Parliament, of royal prerogative and 
representative legislation, of government by divine will and 
government by the will of the nation, were engaged in a bitter 
struggle in England. It is not surprising, then, that there was 
no effective assertion of either of these types of authority in the 
colonies. Every time that the king set out to assert his authority 
in the colonies he was thwarted by the turn of political events in 
England. Charles I came to the throne proclaiming his ^'full 
resolution that there be one uniform Course of Government in 
and through our whole Monarchie." The careful instructions 
to his royal governor in Virginia (1628), the appointment of a 
commission of privy councilors on colonial affairs (1634), the 
proceedings instituted to deprive IMassachusetts of her charter 
(1635), and the appointment of a special customs officer in 
Virginia (1636) all point to a policy of royal control. But at the 
critical moment the outbreak of the Scottish rebelhon diverted 
Charles from his purpose and involved him in a civil war which 
was to end only with his execution. The Interregnum was a 
period of such instability that Cromwell, in spite of a sincere 
interest in the colonies, was unable to develop any consistent 
poHcy of dealing with them in his short tenure of power. Of 
course, as a Puritan, his sympathies were with New England, 
where the powerful colony of IMassachusetts Bay needed no 
lessons in ^'independency" from the master of the EngHsh 
Independents.^ 

A very vigorous policy of colonial regulation was initiated at 
the accession of Charles II. Standing councils for trade and 
plantations were created, in order that ^'so many remote colonies 

lA curious attempt at the exercise of dictatorial power in the colonies was 
made by Cromwell when he tried to remove the entire population of Massa- 
chusetts to the island of Jamaica, which he had conquered from Spain (1655). 
He had to reduce Virginia to obedience by show of force, Governor Berkeley 
calling the parliamentary leaders "bloody tyrants" and declaring that Virginia 
did not "conceive allegiance due to every faction which might possess itself of 
Westminster HaU." 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



25 



and governments, so many ways considerable to our crown and 
dignity, should be collected and brought under such a uniform 
inspection and conduct that we may better supply our royal 
counsells to their future regulation, securitie, and improve- 
ment." At the same time Parliament began to legislate for 
colonial trade by the famous Navigation Acts (which we shall 
notice presently), passed in 1660 and 1663. Furthermore, in 
the first four years of his reign Charles II gave charters to 
Connecticut and Rhode Island, conferred the vast grant of 
CaroHna on a board of eight proprietors, granted the land be- 
tween the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers to his brother, the 
Duke of York, and sent a commission of four men to the north- 
ern colonies (which Lord Clarendon declared were already 
^^hardening into republics") to inquire into their rehgious, 
political, and economic condition and to make them understand 
once for all that the king's authority must be respected. ^^The 
King did not grant away his Soveraigntie over you when he made 
you a corporation," said the commissioners to the Massachusetts 
magistrates. 

But again European events intervened to postpone the exe- 
cution of this vigorous colonial policy of the early years of 
Charles II. Lord Clarendon fell from power in 1667 and Eng- 
land joined Holland and Sweden in the Triple Alliance against 
Louis XIV. A tumultuous period followed, filled with Dutch 
wars. Exclusion Bills, and Popish Plots, with fears of France 
and Rome, and factions of Whig and Tory. When order was 
restored and the succession to the throne assured to the Duke 
of York, the poHcy of colonial regulation was again resumed. 
The Massachusetts charter was taken away by Charles II in 
1684, and his brother James, who came to the throne the next 
year, proceeded to confiscate the other charters and to unite the 
northern colonies from Mount Desert to Delaware Bay in a 
single great viceroyalty under Sir Edmund Andros. 

The career of Andros (i 686-1 689), who was not an ^^odious 
tyrant" but an able and conscientious servant, is one of the best- 
known and most important episodes in all our colonial history. 
It marks the climax of the Stuart policy in America. Had this 



2 6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



most ambitious plan of colonial control in the seventeenth cen- 
tury succeeded, every charter in the colonies would have been 
annulled, royal officials would have taken the place of elected 
officers, the courts would have been only inferior jurisdictions 
with appeal to England, the viceroyal council would have framed 
and promulgated all the laws, English ^^redcoats" (sixty of 
whom had come over in the man-of-war with Andros) would 
have formed the nucleus of a mixed army in the colonies, Eng- 
lish men-of-war would have patrolled the American coast, the 
Anglican Church would have been established in the stronghold 
of Puritanism, taxes would have been arbitrarily levied by order 
of the governor and council, the ungranted land of the province 
would have been resumed by the crown, and quitrents would 
have been collected from the occupied portions as a sign and 
symbol of English sovereignty/ But the structure of abso- 
lutism reared by Andros in the colonies went down with the col- 
lapse of Stuart despotism in England. Under the new king, 
William III, defender of Parliament and Protestantism, of 
Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, every American colony 
was assured of its legislative assembly, its free tenure of 
land, its unimpeded administration of justice, and its liberty of 
worship. 

^The quitrent was a small land tax paid to the crown in England. As the 
name implies, it was a commutation or relief, to be "quit" of the feudal dues 
of the medieval period. The king generally made over to the proprietors of the 
American provinces this right of collecting quitrents, but as the colonists 
repudiated all feudal obligations as barbarous and outgrown, they saw no 
reason why they should be taxed for their commutation. The quitrent, there- 
fore, was resisted successfully in all the colonies except Maryland. In England 
the quitrent might be in the nature of a relief, but in America it looked like a 
plain tax. There was no sign of the quitrent in New England, and when Andros 
revived the doctrine that the soil belonged to the crown and called the Indian 
signatures to deeds to be of no more account than "a scratch of a bear's paw," 
the Reverend John Higginson of Salem replied for the men of the colony, "We 
received only the right and power of Government from the King's Charter . . . 
but the right of the Land and Soil we received from God according to his 
Grand Charter to the Sons of Adam and Noah, and with the consent of 
the Native Inhabitants." This supernal charter could hardly hold good in 
English law. 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



27 



Thus, four times in the seventeenth century — in the decades 
beginning with the years 1631, 1651, 1661, 1681 — England 
entered on a more or less vigorous colonial policy, and four 
times political exigencies thwarted her plans/ Meantime, while 
England blew hot and cold, the colonies were steadily develop- 
ing from what were originally trading companies or bands of 
refugees into political communities^ more and more conscious 
of their social and economic interests, more and more jealous 
of the rights of their popular assemblies, more and more 
thoroughly equipped with both the organs and the habits of 
self-government. 

Whether this development could have been hindered, had the 
English government consistently realized it (as did a few men 
in England, like Gorges, Mason, and Randolph), is a question 
that it is useless to discuss. The fact is that the English govern- 
ment did not realize it. England persisted in viewing the colo- 
nies primarily as areas of production and marts of trade, and to 
this view she subordinated all her theories of political control. 
This misconception of the true nature of colonies was not due 
to caprice or deliberate oppression on England's part. It was 
the generally accepted idea of overseas colonies, fitting the 
prevalent ^'mercantile theory" in economics, which held that 
a nation's prosperity was measured by the amount of precious 
metals that it could amass by favorable trade balances. To sell 
abroad, therefore, as much as possible for money, and to buy 
abroad with its own manufactures such raw materials or such 
indispensable supplies for its navy or food for its people as 
it could not produce at home, was every country's ideal of 
commerce. And the value of colonies was that they furnished 
at the same time both the raw materials, foodstuffs, and sup- 
plies that the home country needed and the market for her 

^That England's policy, however, stiffened in this period is shown by a com- 
parison of the charters granted to Lord Baltimore (1632) and William Penn 
(1680). Baltimore was given virtually unlimited powers in his province, while 
Penn was obliged to keep an agent in London, to admit Anglicans to his colony, 
and to submit to the right of the king to veto his laws and of Parliament to 
tax his people. 



28 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



manufactured goods. Scholars have called the policy which tried 
to realize this ideal of commerce the ^'Old Colonial System." 
From the day when James I prohibited the planters of Virginia 
and the Somers Islands from sending their tobacco to any coun- 
try but England (1621) down to the outbreak of the American 
Revolution a century and a half later, the trade of the colonies 
was regulated by various Orders in Council and statutes of 
Parliament. The most important of these regulations are con- 
tained in the Navigation Acts, or Acts of Trade, of the second 
half of the seventeenth century. They laid the basis of the Old 
Colonial System and were, in the clauses which applied to 
America, briefly as follows : 

1. An act of 165 1, forbidding the products of Asia, Africa, and 
America to be carried to ports within the dominion of England except 
in vessels owned and in major part manned by English subjects ; and 
forbidding the goods of Europe to be brought to such ports except in 
English ships or ships belonging to the country in which the goods 
were produced or to the ports from which they were usually shipped.^ 

2. An act of 1660, reenacting the provisions of the act of 1651, and 
also specifying certain important products of the plantations, called 
^'enumerated commodities," including tobacco, sugar, cotton, wool, 
indigo, ginger, and dyes, which could be exported from the colonies 
only to England or to other colonies of England. Ships leaving an 
English port for the American colonies had to give a bond with the 
chief customs officer of the port that if they loaded in the colonies 
with any of the enumerated articles, they would bring them back 
directly to England ; and ships from Europe visiting the colonies had 
to deposit a similar bond with the governor of the colony in whose 
port they were lading.^ 

iThis act, aimed against the carrying trade of the Dutch, did not hinder the 
colonies from buying or selling where they pleased in Europe if the vessels they 
traded in were British built, owned, and manned. 

2 This important act determined not only the kind of vessels in which colonial 
goods should be carried but also the destination of certain of these goods. The 
student will note, however, that with the exception of tobacco the enumerated 
articles of 1660 are all products of the West Indies rather than of the American 
mainland. They were articles which did not compete with English production, 
hence they had a favored market in the mother country. 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



29 



3. An act of 1663, providing that all goods imported into the Amer- 
ican colonies (except salt for the fisheries, pro visions, horses and servants 
from Ireland and Scotland, and wines from Madeira and the Azores) 
must first be brought into English ports and there be reshipped.^ 

4. An act of 1672, providing that specified duties should be col- 
lected in the colonies on all enumerated articles loaded on ships whose 
masters did not give the bond required by the act of 1660. Those 
duties should be paid in the colonies, at such places and to such 
officers as the commissioners of customs in England might designate.^ 

5. An act of 1696, reaffirming the acts of Charles II's reign and 
containing stringent clauses for securing the responsibility of revenue 
officers, with penalties for smuggling or false registry ; and authoriz- 
ing collectors and inspectors to visit and search ships, wharves, or 
warehouses to seize unlawful merchandise.^ 

Now these measures of the Old Colonial System were enacted 
not at all for the purpose of injuring the colonies, but rather of 
mutually benefiting the trade of the colonies and the mother 
country. They even contained liberal concessions to America 
in the way of drawbacks, bounties, and prohibition of Euro- 
pean competition in the British markets. But for all that, they 
proved burdensome to the Americans from the outset. The 
English market became less and less adequate to absorb the 
colonial tobacco crop.* The duties collected on the enumerated 

iThis act made England the "staple" for colonial trade. The duties collected 
in English ports on European goods destined for the colonies protected the Brit- 
ish merchants from competition. On articles which did not compete with British 
production the duties were generally remitted, on reshipment to the colonies, by 
a system of "drawbacks." 

2 This was the first act imposing duties to be collected in the colonies by 
revenue officials appointed in England. Such officials were actually designated 
in Virginia, the Carolinas, New York, and Massachusetts. 

^This severe act of 1696, says Professor Edward Channing, "added the 
finishing touch to the colonial system so far as shipping was concerned. . . . 
All further shipping laws were in the nature of detailed regulations" to carry 
out the law of 1696. The text of the acts above tabulated may be found most 
conveniently in Professor William MacDonald's "Select Charters Illustrative of 
American History, 1606-1775," Nos. 22, 23, 28, 34, 43. 

*The 20,000 pounds of Virginia tobacco exported in 1619 grew to 28,000,000 
pounds (Virginia and Maryland) by the close of the century. The colonists 
were not allowed to sell an ounce of this to Europe; but England, after 



30 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



articles in England were high, and it was both a nuisance and 
an expense for vessels carrying nonenumerated goods from the 
colonies direct to Europe (as they had a right to do) to be 
obliged to bring their return cargoes home by way of England 
(act of 1663) and to suffer all the delay and damage incident 
to transshipment. Worst of all, enforcement of the acts would 
inevitably mean a stricter political control of the colonies, 
a closer relationship between the governors and the crown, 
the multiplication of royal officials in the colonies, and perhaps 
even the presence of English warships in American waters. 

^^It was far more easy," says a historian of the eighteenth 
century, ^^to enact these various laws than to enforce their 
punctual execution. Even the best-affected colonies, — Barba- 
dos, Virginia, Maryland, — considering them as inconsistent 
with their privileges and destructive of their infant commerce, 
hesitated to obey or eluded their provisions." As for the 
worse-affected colonies of New England, which trafficked 
without restraint wherever hope of gain attracted their navi- 
gators," and which, according to a petition of English mer- 
chants to Parliament, were diverting annually £60,000 of 
revenue from the treasury by their infractions of the Naviga- 
tion Acts, it is enough to read the angry complaint of Edward 
Randolph, who was appointed the first collector of customs in 
Massachusetts (1680) : ^^I am received at Boston more like a 
spy than one of his Majesty's servants. ... It is in every 
man's mouth that they are not subject to the laws of England, 
nor are they of any force in Massachusetts until confirmed by 
them, and that yore Maty had nothing to do with them, they 
were a free people."^ The Navigation Acts were proclaimed 
with beat of drum in the market place at Boston, but they were 

collecting the duty on it, reexported 17,580,000 pounds, or over 60 per cent of 
the crop, to Europe. 

iR. N. Toppan, "Edward Randolph," Vol, III, pp. 54-64. A curious confirma- 
tion comes from another source in the same year. Patoulet, a French intendant 
in the West Indies, wrote to Colbert, "The English who dwell near Boston will 
not worry themselves about the prohibitions which the King of England may 
issue, because they hardly recognise his authority" (George Louis Beer, "The 
Old Colonial System," Pt. I, Vol. II, p. 310), 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



31 



not heeded. King Charles seized the charter of Massachusetts, 
and King James sent Andros to make Boston the capital of a 
viceroyal province in America ; but it was all of no avail. The 
New England colonies were already, in the despairing phrase 
of Lord Clarendon, ^^hardening into republics." 

Thus we have seen that neither the political nor the economic 
control of the American colonies by England was realized in 
the seventeenth century. They should have reenforced each 
other in an efficient system. As early as 1623 a member of the 
Virginia Company urged a stricter regulation of the colony's 
trade by the crown, mutual commerce being the strongest 
bond that will unite Virginia to this state." Again, under the 
Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1656) an influential mer- 
chant named Povey presented an ^'Overture" to the Council 
of State, with the purpose of consolidating the economic re- 
sources of the realm in its war with Spain: ^Ho reduce all 
Collonies and Plantations to a more certaine civill and uniforme 
waie of Government and distribution of publick justice . . . 
that our shipping may be increased, our poore here employed, 
and our manufactures encouraged . . . and by generall con- 
sequences hereof a considerable Revenue may be raised to his 
Highness." As it became evident that the Acts of Trade, so far 
from bringing the colonies into closer political dependence on 
England, needed themselves just that condition of colonial 
dependence in order to be effective, the English government 
set itself seriously to work in the latter half of the seventeenth 
century to supply the deficiency. But the colonies were already 
in a sense beyond English control. Self -direction was growing 
into a habit with them, not so much from any deliberate plan 
as from the simple facts of their situation and settlement. For 
we must remember that the colonies were separated by three 
thousand miles of ocean from the homeland, and that even 
under the most favorable conditions it took three months 
for a communication and answer to pass between them ; ^ and, 

^We see how this delay encouraged the "passive resistance" of the colonies 
to unwelcome orders of the king. The commissioners sent out in 1664 report 
the men of Massachusetts as saying that "they can easily spin out seven years 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



furthermore, that the American colonies of England were not, 
like the distant colonies of the continental nations, founded, 
maintained, and garrisoned at public expense, but were adven- 
tures of private initiative, bound to the king by allegiance but 
not beholden to him for support/ 

Again, the colonists brought with them the habit of local 
government in seventeenth-century England : its county courts, 
its parish vestries, its municipal mayors and aldermen, its jus- 
tices of the peace, its constables, wardens, and tithingmen. 
This all engendered a political alertness which was in striking 
contrast to the leveling and lulling despotism of the French 
and Spanish colonial administration. Being used to manage 
so much of their own business, in local meetings or provincial 
assemblies, the colonists naturally wished to manage all their 
own business. They developed much farther in the direction 
of independent statehood than any English county could, be- 
cause large powers of government were granted by the king^s 
charters to the companies or proprietors that founded them, 
and the royal officials in the colonies were very few until the 
appointment of customs officers to enforce the Navigation Act 
of 1672. 

Finally, even such delegated authority of the crown as there 
was in the colonies was wholly executive in character, whereas 
the colonists looked to their elected assemblies as the directive 
institution in their political life. Governors, councils, judges, 
treasurers, collectors, surveyors — all were there to carry out the 
will of the people. We find this theory of government advanced 
not only in republican" New England but also in proprietary 

in writing, and before that time a change may come." Charles II informed 
them that "his Majesty did not think of treating with his own subjects as with 
strangers.'- But geographically they were strangers, nevertheless, and they 
maintained their "diplomatic attitude" with striking success. 

1 Sandys of the Virginia Company protested as early as 1623 against the 
British monopoly of Virginia tobacco: "Our Plantations were both settled and 
supported by the charge of private adventurers." The Massachusetts Assistants, 
in 1649, declared that their duty to England was acquitted with the payment of 
one fifth of the gold and silver mined in the colony and with prayers for 
England's welfare I 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



33 



Maryland and royal Virginia. The English Parliament had 
to wage a long and bitter fight in the seventeenth century to 
defend certain fundamental liberties against the encroachment 
of the royal prerogative. The American colonies, in a remote 
and virgin land, were relieved of the weight of that prerogative. 
With royal and proprietary appointees dependent on the grants 
of their assemblies for their very bread, with a trade rapidly 
outgrowing and successfully defying the restraints put upon 
it by the home government, with increasing neglect and con- 
tempt of acts of Parliament strictly worded but laxly enforced, 
the colonies came to regard the lawful intervention of the king 
in their affairs like the unwarranted intrusion of a tyrant. 

Today colonies in civilized lands are bound to the mother 
country generally by a rather loose federation, their allegiance 
depending less on any explicit political pact than on a sentiment 
of pride in the common glory of the empire. But the theory of 
colonial control prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries involved, as we have seen, the strict regulation of 
colonial commerce in the interests of national dominion, and 
the responsibility of colonial political authorities for the main- 
tenance of the commercial system. To have put this theory 
into successful operation in the American colonies would have 
required one of two things : either a complete unity of interests 
between the colonies and the mother country (such as was 
assumed again and again in the affable proclamations of Eng- 
lish monarchs from Charles I to George III) or the utter 
subserviency of the colonies to the English crown and Parlia- 
ment. The first of these alternatives the colonies knew was 
a fiction; the second they felt was an insult. Here, then, in 
the failure of British control in the colonies of the seven- 
teenth century, is the germ of the American Revolution. The 
eighteenth century will only furnish the cumulative evidence 
of the failure of the policy of the seventeenth, and in the end 
will dissolve those bonds which it is hardly an exaggeration to 
say were never formed. 



34 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The Expulsion of the French 

From the accession of William of Orange to the English 
throne, in 1689, to the fall of Quebec, seventy years later, the 
one constant factor in the history of the English colonies in 
America was the presence and pressure of the French on their 
northern and western borders — ^Hhe Gallic peril.'^ Estab- 
lished in permanent settlements on the shores of the Bay of 
Fundy and the banks of the St. Lawrence at about the same 
time that the English colonies were started in Virginia and 
New England,^ the French had had a very different history 
and development. The rapidly growing English colonies had 
expended their energy intensively in economic and political 
activities, cultivating their tobacco, wheat, and rice for export, 
building up their commercial ports, exploiting the forests and 
fisheries near their coasts, and developing their organs of local 
government in assemblies, courts, vestries, and town meetings. 
The French in Canada, on the other hand, forbidden the 
least exercise of self-government by the despotic authority of 
Louis XIV, scantily supplied with capital for the cultivation 
of the unremunerative glacial soil of the St. Lawrence valley, 
themselves but a handful of men in a vast wilderness, found an 
outlet for their restless spirits in ambitious schemes for winning 
a continent for the glory of France and its savage tribes for 
the Church of Rome. The story, in all its thrilling details of 
courage and pathos, of cruelty and persecution, can be read in 
Francis Parkman's unrivaled volumes on the French in Amer- 
ica. Before the close of the Stuart period the French adven- 
turers and missionaries, the fur-traders and wood-rangers 
(coureurs de bois), had gone up the St. Lawrence and the Great 
Lakes, established their forts and missions as far west as the 
point of Lake Superior, crossed the portages from Lakes Erie 

iPort Royal, Acadia, was founded in 1604, Jamestown in 1607, Quebec in 
1608, Plymouth in 1620, Maryland in 1632, Montreal in 1642. An interesting 
anticipation of the long rivalry between France and England in America was 
Samuel Argall's attack on Port Royal in 1613, on the ground that the settle- 
ment was within the limits of the Virginia grant of 1606. 




The Encircling French 



36 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



and jMichigan to the headwaters of the Ohio basin, ascended 
the ]\Iississippi to the Falls of St. Anthony (MinneapoHs and 
St. Paul), and finally, in the person of the intrepid Cavelier 
de La Salle, followed the Father of Waters down to its mouth 
and planted the lilies of France on the shores of the Gulf of 
IMexico. So the French power extended, with its sparse cordon 
of forts, missions, and fur postS; in a huge arc of twenty-five 
hundred miles, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the 
mouth of the ^Mississippi completely enveloping the English 
colonies on the Atlantic coast. 

The English began to realize the Gallic peril" in the fateful 
decade that saw the overthrow of the Stuart dynasty. Thomas 
Dongan, the Duke of York's able governor, arriving in his 
American province of New York the year after La Salle had 
reached the mouth of the Mississippi (1683), found the prov- 
ince in dire danger. Count Frontenac, governor of New France, 
had just completed a ten-year period of vigorous rule at 
Quebec. He had labored without ceasing to extend the bounds 
of New France, to increase its military efficiency, and to unite 
its inhabitants in enthusiasm^ for the maintenance of the power 
of Louis XIV on the American continent. He was especially 
concerned to win the confidence of the Seneca Indians, so 
that he might gain access to the Ohio valley through their 
lands to the south of Lake Ontario.^ He even entertained the 
hope of weaning the Iroquois tribes from their attachment to 
the English and of descending the valley of the Hudson with 
his French troops and Indian allies to drive the Duke of York's 
governor from his capital. Thus he would sever the New Eng- 
land colonies from their southern sisters and secure for the king 

^The Senecas were the westernmost and largest tribe of the Iroquois Con- 
federac3% a league of five semicivilized tribes extending across the central part 
of New York from Lake Erie to the lower Mohawk valley. In 1609 Champlain, 
by joining the Algonquins in a battle against the Iroquois, had inspired in the 
latter a fierce hatred against the French, which devoted Jesuit missionaries and 
successive governors at Quebec labored in vain to remove. The friendship of 
the Iroquois proved of inestimable advantage to the English on the Hudson. 
The Indians acted as a buffer against the French and kept them from reaching 
the Mississippi Valley by the easy route south of the Great Lakes. 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



37 



of France the finest harbor on the Atlantic coast for the ter- 
minal of the important fur trade of the vast interior. 

Dongan's spirited correspondence with Frontenac's succes- 
sors, La Barre and Denonville, is the first clear note of defiance 
sounded by the English against the encroachments of the 
French.^ Dongan was in the midst of his ardent epistolary- 
altercation with Denonville when Governor Andros arrived in 
Boston (December 20, 1686) to fuse the colonies of New 
England, with New York and New Jersey, into a single royal 
province. 

We have already noticed the mission of Andros as the last 
attempt of the Stuarts to secure recognition of their authority 
and obedience to their commercial regulation in the American 
colonies (see page 25). But the Andros government has 
another aspect quite as important. It was not only the cul- 
mination of the Stuart policy of the seventeenth century but 
also the foreshadowing of the Hanoverian policy of the eight- 
eenth; namely, the consolidation of the colonies to meet the 
threat of the French and Indians on their borders. Andros 
brought a few British redcoats to Boston and made plans for 
the chastisement of the Indians, who, under French provoca- 
tion, were threatening the settlements in Maine and New 
Hampshire. But he had no support from the colonies. In 
their eyes he was a greater danger even than the Indians, for 
he was an enemy to their chartered rights, an Anglican infected 
with ^^prelatical corruption," and the devoted servant of a 
*^popish" king. Instead of trusting him to defend them against 

lA few years before Dongan's arrival the intendant of New France at Quebec 
wrote to Paris that a "grand future" was before the French in Canada and 
that "the colonies of foreign nations (England) so long settled on the seaboard 
[were] trembling with fright" in view of what Louis XIV had accomplished. 
But Dongan's letters give little hint of fear. The bluff old Irishman spared 
neither vituperation nor sarcasm. He wrote Denonville to know whether "a 
few loose fellows rambling among the Indians to keep from starving gave 
France a right to the country," or the fact that " some rivers or rivuletts run out 
into the great river of Canada." "O just God !" he exclaimed, "what new farre- 
fetched and unheard-of pretense is this for the title to a country ! The French 
King may have as good a pretense to all those countreys that drink clarette and 
brandy!" 



38 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the danger from Canada, the Puritan leaders in Massachusetts 
entertained the fear that his plan was to betray their province 
to the Catholics of New France. What else could be the mean- 
ing of his insolent reminder that ^'the privileges of Englishmen 
would not follow them to the end of the world ! 

The Stuart plan of a consolidated military province in 
America, therefore, failed at just the moment when it was most 
needed. The plan was not renewed when William of Orange's 
accession to the throne relieved both the mother country and 
the colonies of the fear of a Catholic and absolutist reaction. 
For, in the first place, William^ involved in a tremendous 
struggle with Louis XIV on the Continent, had to divert his 
attention for a while from the colonies; and, in the second 
place, as the Whig champion of parliamentary rule, he could 
hardly with good grace confiscate colonial charters and sup- 
press colonial assemblies. A compromise was therefore reached. 
Connecticut and Rhode Island were allowed to resume govern- 
ment under their old charters, and Massachusetts received a 
new one, providing for a royal governor. New York was given 
an assembly. Governors no longer brought royal troops with 
them to their provinces, as Andros had done, but, at the same 
time, instructions to royal officials in America to maintain the 
prerogatives of the crown began to grow long and explicit, 
and the Navigation Act of 1696 (see page 29) placed in 
the colonies a number of collectors, naval officers, surveyors, 
and admiralty judges — the first considerable body of English 
officials in America. 

In the generation immediately following the expulsion of 
the Stuarts there were many measures taken by the crown for 
tightening royal control in the colonies without invading char- 
tered rights or traditional liberties. The royal veto was freely 

^The "Gentlemen, Merchants and Inhabitants of Boston" declared in a mani- 
festo of April 18, 1689, "We have seized upon these few ill men which have been 
(next to our sins) the grand authors of our misery . . . lest ere we are aware 
we find ourselves to be given away to a Forreign Power." So also Jacob Leisler 
seized power in New York in 1689 to prevent the province from being betrayed 
to the French by the governor's councilors, whom he calls "Popishly affected 
Dogs and Rogues." 




Drift toward Royal Control in the Colonies, i 682-1 752 



40 



THE UNITED STATES OF AIMERICA 



exercised over acts of the colonial legislatures (though it was 
abandoned over acts of Parliament in 1707) ; right of appeal 
to the king's Privy Council was extended to private individuals 
in the colonies ; Parhament passed laws estabhshing a colonial 
post office and regulating colonial currency ; the same man was 
often made governor over two or more colonies; and, finally, 
the crown was prompt to convert the proprietary provinces 
into the roj^al t3^pe on the least provocation. The Jerseys were 
taken under roj^al control in 1702, and the rights of the Carolina 
proprietors were purchased by the crown in 1729. Even 
Pennsylvania and iNIaryland did not escape passing under royal 
control for a brief season. The Tories in England, supported 
by the Anglicans in the colonies, urged that the king confiscate 
all the American charters and make an end of Quakers, 
Puritans, and Independents in the colonies. Bills introduced 
into Parliament for this purpose in 1701, 1706, 171 5, and 1722 
were defeated b}^ the Whigs. Yet the process went far. In 
1682 Virginia and New Hampshire were the only royal colonies 
on the mainland of America. Fifty years later the New England 
colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island and the proprietary 
provinces of Penn and Baltimore w^re the only ones 710 1 under 
direct royal government. 

The whole burden of American history in the eighteenth cen- 
tury is the demonstration of the unworkable character of this 
compromise in colonial government arrived at by the victorious 
Whigs of the English Revolution. The machinery of it creaked 
in ever}^ joint. It was inconsistent to overthrow Stuart pre- 
tensions in England and maintain them in the colonies by re- 
fusing to extend the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus to 
Englishmen across the Atlantic. It was foohsh, when insist- 
ing on the subjection of the executive to the legislature in 
England, to think that the colonists (who had taken their part 
too in the Revolution) would gracefully submit to an increasing 
domination by executive officials appointed by the crown. It 
was inconsistent to insist on the royal veto in the colonies just at 
the moment when it was dropped in England, and to demand a 
share in financial legislation for the king's appointed councils in 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



41 



America while at home the Commons alone held the purse 
strings with a jealous tenacity. Finally, it was a mockery to 
leave the assemblies standing in the colonies and yet expect them 
to abandon their functions by accepting the king's instructions 
to royal governors as the law of the land. Benjamin Franklin 
reports that the president of the Privy Council told him baldly 
in 1757 that ^'the king is the legislative of the colonies." 

We have long been accustomed to lay the blame for the 
American Revolution on the stubbornness and stupidity of 
George III and his Tory ministers during the fifteen years pre- 
ceding the outbreak of the war — and they deserve their full 
share of blame. At the same time, however, we must remember 
the failure of the Whig lords during their long tenure of power 
in the eighteenth century (i 714-1760) to extend the prin- 
ciples and privileges of the great Enghsh Revolution of 1689 
to the colonies. The English Revolution was a turning-point in 
colonial history. It was the auspicious moment for the estab- 
lishment of a federation between the colonies and the mother 
country, based on mutual confidence and the enjoyment of the 
same fundamental rights. The opportunity was lost, and, what 
is worse, from that time down to the American Revolution there 
seems to have been but a single important British official having 
to do with colonial affairs who realized that an opportunity had 
been lost and labored to redeem it — the incomparable William 
Pitt. That Pitt's suggestions for conciliation were scornfully 
rejected by the English government as falling in with the 
ideas of America in almost every particular" is a sufficient com- 
mentary on the disastrous policy of alienation of the American 
colonies entered upon by the victorious Whig aristocracy two 
generations before the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party. 

Nowhere were the defects of this policy more conspicuous 
than in the strained relations between the colonial assemblies 
and the royal governors. The governors were instructed to 
maintain the prerogative of the crown undiminished, as in the 
Stuart period ; while the assemblies, seeing the king limited by 
his Parliament in England, thought it only a fair conclusion 
that the king's servants should be limited by his legislature in 



42 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the colonies. If Parliament was the guardian of the liberties 
of England, no less were the colonial assemblies the guardians 
of the liberties of America. The colonies, growing rapidly in 
numbers and wealth/ chafed under the galling yoke that was 
intended to keep them in ^^a limited economic freedom and a 
subordinate poHtical status." They thought they should have 
done hearing the language of Andros, that they ^Vere either 
subjects or rebels." They were English freemen, protected 
in their rights by royal charters and beholden only to them- 
selves and to their fathers for their planting and growth in the 
New World.^ Their spokesmen, then, in their elected assemblies 
held the royal governors in check at every point. In Massa- 
chusetts the assembly refused to vote the governor a permanent 
salary, but made him yearly or half-yearly grants. In New 
York governor and assembly clashed on the right of royal ap- 
pointees to interfere with the levy of taxes and the sessions of 
the legislature. In New England and South Carolina they 
wrangled over coast defenses; in Pennsylvania, over the ex- 
emption of the proprietor's lands from taxation ; in Maryland, 
over the collection of quitrents ; in the Jerseys, over the author- 
ity of the royal judges ; in almost every colony, over the issue 
of paper money and the enforcement of the Acts of Trade. It 
seemed not only to the vexed governors themselves but to 
disinterested observers as well that the colonies regarded them- 
selves as Httle free states. ''The New York assembly," wrote 
Peter Kalm, a visitor from Sweden, in 1750, ''may be looked 
upon as a Parliament or a Diet in miniature." Four years later 
the Privy Council complained of the same body to King 

iThe 225,000 colonists of 1689 had grown to 1,500,000 by 1760. Their exports 
in the same period increased from £390,000 to £1,763,000. They imported in 1760 
merchandise from England alone to the value of £2,000,000. Down to the Han- 
overian succession (1714) British trade with the West Indies was more important 
than that with the mainland, but by 1760 the exports from England to North 
America were more than double those to the West Indies. Instructive tables are 
printed in Channing's "History of the United States," Vol. II, pp. 524-526. 

2 It was not till the surrender of the colony of Georgia to the crown in 1752 
that Parliament made any grant of money for administration in America. Great 
Britain expected every colony to stand on its own feet. 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



43 



George II, that they ^^had taken to themselves not only the 
management and disposal of the public money, but also wrested 
from your Majesty's governor the nomination of all officers of 
government, the custody and direction of all military stores, 
the mustering and regulating of the troops raised for your 
Majesty's service, and in short almost every other executive 
part of government." The ^'independency" which Massachu- 
setts had shown under the Stuart kings was infectious. ^'The 
example and spirit of the Boston people," wrote Governor 
Cosby of New York, in 1734, ^'begins to spread among these 
colonies in a most prodigious manner." 

The situation was the more trying for the governors because 
they could not rely for support on the home government. In 
fact, they hardly knew to whom to look for such support. 
In the Stuart period the royal governor was the king's servant 
alone, knowing where to carry his complaints and whence to 
take his orders. But after 1689 there was great confusion in 
colonial administration. Parliament, the Privy Council, and 
the Board of Trade all took a hand in it, each rebuking the 
other for trespassing on its field, but none assuming the con- 
tinuous and enlightened responsibility necessary for the build- 
ing of a stable colonial empire. 

Moreover, the duty laid upon them to enforce the unpopu- 
lar Navigation Acts still further embarrassed the colonial 
governors. The act of 1696 bound them by oath to secure 
obedience to the laws, under pain of a fine of £1000, but at the 
same time gave them no adequate weapons of enforcement. It 
would have taken a fleet of warships on the coast and a regi- 
ment of redcoats in every colony to enforce the acts. James 
Otis, at the close of the period, said that ''if the King of Eng- 
land were encamped on Boston Common with 20,000 men, he 
could not execute these laws." The great merchants, like John 
Hancock and Peter Faneuil, throve on illicit trade. As early 
as 1 72 1 a Boston trader named Amory wrote, ^'If you have a 
captain you can confide in, you will find it easy to import all 
kinds of goods from the Streights, France, and Spain, although 
prohibited." 



44 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



It became more and more evident, as the population and 
wealth of the colonies increased, that the attempt to treat them 
solely as a nation of customers of Great Britain was a stupid 
piece of business. The mother country no longer furnished a 
sufficient market for their tobacco and other enumerated 
commodities,"^ while the liberty to carry the rest of their 
products where they would was small comfort when the return 
cargo had to be carried to an English port for inspection and 
perhaps taxation. Only one important addition was made to 
the Navigation Acts in the eighteenth century, to be sure, but 
that one was the most damaging of them all. It was the famous 
Sugar and Molasses Act of 1733, which, in order to protect 
the plantation-owners in the British West Indies, imposed the 
prohibitive duties of gd. a gallon on rum, 6d. a gallon on 
molasses, and 55. a hundredweight on sugar imported into 
the American colonies from the Spanish, French, and Dutch 
islands. As the British West Indies could not begin to furnish 
either the amount of molasses required for the distilleries of 
New England, or the market to take the flour, fish, lumber, and 
wheat exported from the mainland, the act of 1733, if enforced, 
would have utterly ruined the trade of New England and the 
middle colonies. 

Thus political custom and commercial interests in the col- 
onies both ran counter to the British policy of uniformity in 
control just when that policy seemed most necessary for the 
frustration of the French designs. ^'His Majesty has subjects 
enough in America," wrote the Board of Trade in 1696, ^Uo 
drive out the French from Canada, but they are so crumbled 
into little governments and so disunited that they have hitherto 

1 Molasses and rice had been put on the list of enumerate'd goods in 170S, 
and later (1722) naval stores, copper, beaver, and furs were added. The pro- 
duction of tobacco had so increased by the year 1700 that about two thirds of 
the crop sent to England from Virginia and Maryland was reexported to the con- 
tinent of Europe, with a rebate to the colonists of 75 per cent of the duties. But 
even with this rebate, the rehandling of the cargo, the warehousing, and the double 
freight charges made it impossible for the cheaper grades of American tobacco 
(if sent lawfully via England) to compete with the European product. American 
tobacco was often burned at the English docks as a drug on the market. 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



45 



afforded but little assistance to each other, and now seem in 
a much worse disposition to do it for the future." The gover- 
nors took the imperial view of the case: all minor matters, 
like budgets, taxes, appeals, should yield to the supreme duty 
of guarding the British Empire in America against the en- 
croachments of the French. But the assemblies insisted first 
and foremost on their privileges as English freemen. Where 
they were most uncompromisingly true to English tradition, 
there they seemed most disloyal to England's interests in 
America. ^^Such a wrong-headed people I thank God I have 
never had to deal with before," exclaimed Governor Dinwiddle 
to the Virginia Burgesses. He found them obstinate, self- 
conceited, and in too much of a republican way of thinking." 
It was reported that the Pennsylvania assembly told their 
governor in plain terms that they ^'had rather the French 
should conquer them than give up their privileges." 

The governors of New France were plagued by no such 
trials. Their colonists were few, but their authority was un- 
questioned. Canada since 1663 was a unified royal province, 
ruled by the king's governor from his rock-citadel at Quebec. 
Louis XIV did not parley with his subjects in America: he 
commanded them. Charles of England sent a civil commission 
to New York and New England in 1664 to investigate alleged 
breaches of his authority; but Louis of France at the same 
moment sent to Canada the crack Carignan-Sallieres regiment 
of a thousand men. The English governors had permanent 
provincial assemblies to deal with, but the French court would 
not even let the Estates of Canada gather in the cathedral at 
Quebec to grace the governor's inaugxiration (1672). This 
same governor, Frontenac, was warned by the great minister 
Colbert never to give corporate form to the inhabitants of 
Canada." It was not alone two races, then, or two territorial 
rivals that clashed in the mighty conflict between France and 
England for the North American continent. It was two ideals 
of government: on the one side, a paternal absolutism sup- 
ported by military force; on the other, a jealous tenacity of 
individual rights five centuries old. 



46 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



So long as the Stuarts ruled in England, their governors in 
America, even though chafing (like Dongan and Andros) under 
the threats of the French and the Indians, were obliged to 
preserve an appearance of civility in dealing with the servants 
of the ^'good royal cousin" at Versailles, who furnished money 
to Charles and James to enable them to dispense with an 
inquisitive Parliament. The accession of William of Orange 
cleared the air. France and England became open foes and 
grappled in the first battles of a struggle of a century and a 
quarter, which was to determine the mastery of the seas, the 
primacy of commercial power, and the scepter of empire.^ 
The fight for colonial supremacy in America was but one act 
in the drama. The names of Louisburg, Ticonderoga, Pitts- 
burgh, and Quebec stand engraved on the same tablets with 
La Hogue, Blenheim, Dettingen, and Plassey, to commemorate 
the triumph of British Imperialism. 

Until the middle of the eighteenth century the war in 
America was sporadic and unorganized. Indian raids on the 
border settlements of New England and New York, accom- 
panied by the horrors of massacre at Schenectady (1690), 
Deerfield (1704), and Haverhill (1708), filled the colonies 
with dismay, but failed to unite them in defense. They were, 
says Governor Fletcher of New York (1693), ^^as much divided 
as Christian and Turk." Ambitious counterexpeditions of the 
English against Quebec were wrecked on the divided counsels 
of the colonies (1690) or on the rocks of the St. Lawrence 
(1711). The merchants and planters of the Atlantic coast, 
far from the scenes of frontier massacres and absorbed in their 
trade with Europe and the Indies, were indifferent to their 
governors' pleas for defense. They even spoke of the regiments 
which England sent over to protect them as alien garrisons." 
Although the English outnumbered the French in America 

iln the one hundred and twenty-six years from the accession of William of 
Orange to the overthrow of Napoleon (1815) England and France fought seven 
wars, filling fifty-seven years, during which France lost her colonial empire and 
her dictatorial position in European cabinets. England emerged the strongest 
of the Old World nations. 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



47 



sixteen to one (1,300,000 to 80,000) they had not, after two 
generations of covert or open hostility, gained a single point 
of vantage. Intercolonial conferences were called, but not 
attended. Plans of union were proposed, but not accepted. 
It would be impossible to imagine a more dilapidated state of 
public opinion than that in which the English colonies faced 
what proved to be their final struggle with France. 

It was a moment fraught with tremendous consequences for 
the future of America when a young major of militia from 
Virginia, just come of age, tall and straight, with a command- 
ing steel-blue eye and a countenance open as the dawn, was 
ushered into the presence of the officers of the French Fort Le 
Boeuf in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The envoy 
was George Washington, and the message that he brought from 
Governor Dinwiddle of Virginia was a warning to the French 
to keep off the land ^^so notoriously known to be the property 
of the crown of Great Britain." Washington was courteously 
received and informed that his message would be transmitted 
to the governor at Quebec. Then he set out on his perilous 
journey through the wilderness back to the frontier settlements, 
doubtless turning over in his mind the boastful oath which he 
had heard the French officers at Venango swear in their cups, 
that their design was to take possession of the Ohio, and ^^by 
God! we will do it." 

The possession of the Ohio was the bone of contention. At 
almost the same moment French and English expeditions 
moved down its rich valley — the French under Celeron de 
Bienville^ (1749) nailing signs to the trees and sinking leaden 
plates under the river banks to claim the land for Louis XV, 
and Christopher Gist (1750) prospecting for the new Ohio Com- 
pany (formed by Virginian and English capitalists) and deter- 
mined ^Ho go quite down to the Mississippi rather than take 
mean and broken land." The Indians along the river banks 
listened in turn to the blandishments of the French and the 
threats of the English, drank their brandy and rum and ac- 
cepted their gifts of wampum with impartial stolidity, little 

^Some scholars spell this name Blainville. 



48 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



dreaming that they were the dusky chorus in the opening 
of a tragedy of war that was to be played on the stage of 
three continents. 

The first two years of the war brought only disaster to Eng- 
lish arms. It seemed as though the punishment of half a 
century of incompetence and wrangling, of divided councils 
and dissipated resources, were being visited on the colonies. 
Expeditions planned in boastful leisure were abandoned in 
panic. Neglected garrisons were exposed to massacre at the 
hands of the uncontrollable savage allies of the French. Rival- 
ries and insubordination were rife. Governors and assemblies, 
king^s troops and provincial levies, were all trying to shift to 
the other's shoulders the blame for the disasters. A royal 
order of May, 1756, reduced all the higher colonial officers to 
the rank of captain when they were serving in the same army 
with officers of the king's commission, and the American sol- 
diers, though they often saved the day by their rude efficiency, 
had to hear themselves called "greenhorns," "ragamuffins," and 
"rabble" by the trained but incompetent commanders who were 
sent over to lead them. Braddock's defeat (1755) exposed the 
frontiers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to the fury 
of the Indians along a line of three hundred and fifty miles, 
which the heroic Washington, with only 1500 ill-equipped and 
ill-assorted troops, labored in anguish of soul to defend.^ 

^We hear already from the young colonel of twenty-five the language of 
bitter disillusionment which was to be so often in his mouth during the dark 
days of the American Revolution and the trying days of his presidency. He 
laments the hour that gave him a commission, and would "at any other time 
than this of imminent danger resign without one hesitating moment a com- 
mand" from which he never expects " to reap honor or benefit, while the murder 
of helpless families may be laid to [his] account." How serious the situation 
was, with the frontier from the Hudson to the James guarded by only thirty- 
five blockhouses, can be judged from a letter of a French captain written home 
in July, 1756: "We are making here a place that history will not forget. The 
Enghsh colonies have ten times more people than ours, but these wretches have 
not the least knowledge of war. . . . Not a week passes but the French send 
them a band of 'hair-dressers' whom they would be very glad to dispense with. 
It is incredible what a quantity of scalps they bring us. In Virginia they have 
committed unheard-of cruelties, carried off families, burned a great many 



^'HE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



49 



Every effort for union among the colonies since the beginning 
of the French wars (1690) had come to naught through mutual 
mistrust. The last such attempt was the Albany Congress of 
June, 1754, where, in the very days when Washington was 
fighting for the control of the Ohio, the assembled delegates 
from the New England colonies, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and 
New York, including some of the most distinguished persons 
in America, had to listen to very plain and unpalatable truths 
from the old Mohawk chief Hendrick: ^'Look about your 
country and see ; you have no fortifications, no, not even in this 
town. It is but a step from Canada hither, and the French may 
come and turn you out of doors. You desire us to speak from 
the bottom of our heart and we will do it. Look at the French : 
they are men. They are fortifying everywhere. But you are 
like women, bare and open, without fortifications." After two 
years of uninterrupted disaster the elegant Lord Chesterfield 
confirmed the words of the old Indian chieftain : We are un- 
done both at home and abroad — at home by our increasing debt 
and expenses, abroad by our ill-luck and incapacity. We are 
no longer a nation ! " 

Then fortune changed overnight. A man came to the helm 
of the British government for the first time within the memory 
of a generation — a man incorruptible among a gang of thieves,, 
far-visioned amid a crowd of opportunists, energetic, confident, 
generous, resourceful in a public service on which the blight of 
fear and irresolution had settled. William Pitt appealed from 
the narrow Whig aristocracy, which had controlled Parliament 
and king for nearly half a century, to the British nation at large. 
He called Scotchmen and Americans to the privilege of partner- 
ship in the empire and accorded them the confidence of partners. 
He turned the war in both hemispheres from a feeble and timor- 
ous defensive into a bold and planful attack all along the line. 
Defying the claims of birth and the clamor of placemen, he 
chose his generals and admirals for valor and counsel alone. 

houses, and killed an infinity of people. These miserable English are in the 
extremity of distress, and repent too late of the unjust war they began against 
us." (Quoted in Parkman's "Montcalm and Wolfe," Vol. I, p. 392.) 



50 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



A new tone pervaded the dispatches to America. The governors 
of the crown were asked to win their assembhes and not to bully 
them. The odious order of May, 1756, was revoked and 
colonial officers took rank with the king's own. On the morn- 
ing that the new order was read to the General Court at Boston 
the colony of Massachusetts voted the entire number of men 
that had been asked for from all New England. The American 
colonies as a whole increased their contingents fivefold. Massa- 
chusetts voted £172,000 for the war in the first two months of 
1758, although her farming and fishing population was already 
burdened with heavy taxes. New Hampshire sent one out of 
three of her able-bodied men to the field of battle. Under able 
and intrepid commanders like Amherst, Wolfe, Howe, and 
Forbes, the British attack was delivered all along the line from 
the grim fortress of Louisburg, which guarded the entrance of 
the St. Lawrence, to Fort Duquesne, at the forks of the Ohio. 

Louisburg surrendered to Amherst in July, 1758. In 
November General Forbes drove the French from Fort 
Duquesne and rebuilt the shattered walls under the name of 
Fort Pitt. The next May, Bourlamaque withdrew from Crown 
Point and Ticonderoga, opening to the English the lake whose 
sapphire surface stretched like a broad pavement down to the 
St. Lawrence valley and the outposts of Montreal. The sur- 
render of Niagara to Amherst, in July, cut off the interior lake 
posts of the French (Detroit, Mackinac, St. Joseph, Sault Ste. 
Marie) and compelled them to abandon the forts of the upper 
Ohio valley (Presqu'ile, Venango, Le Boeuf), flanked as they 
were by the Enghsh at Niagara and Fort Pitt. The crowning ex- 
ploit of the war came in September, 1759, when Wolfe, after 
lying nearly three months with his fleet in the St. Lawrence 
before the impregnable rock of Quebec, conceived and executed 
the daring plan which set out his army in the early morning 
mists in battle array on the Plains of Abraham and opened the 
gates of the city to the brave soldiers whose shouts of triumph 
fell on his dying ear. The capture of Quebec was the brightest 
jewel in the crown of the wonderful year of 1759, the ^^year of 
victory," when French arms were defeated at Minden beyond 



THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 



the Rhine and French fleets destroyed at Quiberon on the coast 
of Brittany and driven from Pondicherry on the coast of India. 
That year was the imperishable tribute to the genius of William 
Pitt. England's sorrow was changed to joy. ^^The bells of 
London ring out for a new victory every morning/' cried Horace 
Walpole. The gloomy prediction of Chesterfield, made two years 
earlier, was fulfilled, but Httle as he had dreamed. England 
was, indeed, ^^no longer a nation" — she was a world empire. 

On September 8, 1760, after the fall of Montreal, the governor 
of New France, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, signed the capitu- 
lation by which Canada with all its dependencies was trans- 
ferred to the British crown. On October 24, 1760, George III 
came to the English throne. The new king wished to rule as 
well as to reign. He was a politician enamored of his own po- 
litical sagacity. He was a high Tory and surrounded himself, 
with Tory henchmen. They plotted against the great minister, 
and in October, 1761, William Pitt resigned the seals. It was 
of momentous consequence to the American colonies that the 
great statesman who is ranked with Washington as a builder of 
our nation fell from power at just the moment when the French 
were driven from this continent. For Pitt looked on the colonies 
as more than an auxiliary of England for the humiliation of 
France. He wished to see them bound in a close federation 
with each other and with the motherland, proud of their place 
in the empire, their local loyalties not lost but fortified in their 
larger loyalty to Britain. Conciliation, not coercion, was his 
watchword. He was, in the phrase of Hubert Hall, "the first 
high almoner of statecraft to cast his bread on distant waters." 
And had he maintained his tenure of power unbroken for a score 
of years, as Walpole had before him, he might have made the 
bonds between the men of EngHsh race on both sides of the 
Atlantic strong and elastic enough to meet generations of 
economic growth or political tension. 

However, it is probable that even William Pitt, with all his 
tact and conciliatoriness, could not have prevented the eventual 
separation of the American colonies from England. For the 
colonies during the eighteenth century were diverging more and 



52 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



more from the motherland. Though their population was still 
chiefly of English stock, nevertheless, by incorporating the 
Dutch of the Netherlands and absorbing large numbers of 
French, Germans, and Scotch-Irish, they had introduced ele- 
ments of population indifferent if not hostile to English institu- 
tions. The presence of several hundred thousand negro slaves 
still further complicated the social question. In political de- 
velopment too the colonies had tended to grow away from the 
mother country. The concentration of power in the hands of 
Parliament, conducted by a ministry or cabinet, was opposed to 
the colonial emphasis on local authorities in assembly, vestry, 
or town meeting ; while the executive power in almost all of the 
colonies was the rival and not the agent of the legislative. 
Finally, as we have already seen, the commercial policy of the 
Navigation Acts ran counter to the interests of America's de- 
veloping trade and took on increasingly the aspect of exploita- 
tion. If these social, political, and economic differences were 
to be harmonized at all, it would have to be through the exercise 
of an enlightened, generous, and conciliatory spirit. 

The brief period of William Pitt's ministry looked like the 
dawn of such a promise. The colonies seemed fused by the fires 
of a victorious patriotism into an imperial unity. The triumphs 
of Amherst and Wolfe were hailed with grateful joy from New 
Hampshire to Georgia. The governor of Massachusetts pro- 
claimed a day of thanksgiving, and the preachers vied with each 
other in sermons of extravagant congratulation over the down- 
fall of New France, ^^the North American Babylon," ^Hhe seat 
of Satan and Indian idolatry." But in the midst of rejoicing 
there were ominous signs and warnings. Report came to 
America of the fall of the great minister and the abandonment 
of his policy. The new young king was in the hands of the 
Tories, insistent on his prerogative, determined to have obedi- 
ence to the letter of his royal orders. Murmurs against 
"arbitrary acts" of Parliament were rising in Boston and 
Williamsburg in the very days in which the terms of the treaty 
with France were being promulgated, and wise observers were 
suggesting that it might be better for England to keep the rich 




North America at the Close of the French Wars 



5^ 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



sugar island of Guadeloupe and let the French stay in Canada 
as a wholesome check on the ''republican" tendencies of the 
colonies. ''They will not fail to shake off their dependence," 
said the French minister Choiseul, "the moment Canada is 
ceded." Canada was ceded, however, by the Treaty of Paris 
(1763), and the English flag waved over the North American 
continent from Hudson's Straits to the Gulf of Mexico. The 
stage was cleared for the opening act of our national drama. 
"With the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham," says 
John Richard Green, "began the history of the United States." 

In the prelude of a Wagnerian opera we hear anticipating 
strains and fragments of the various themes which are worked 
out in detail in the course of the tragic drama. Perhaps it 
is not too fanciful to see in the colonial period of our history 
a sort of prelude to the drama of our national life. Liberty, 
Democracy, and Union are the ideals for which successive gen- 
erations have wrought and fought in our land — the generations 
of Washington, of Jackson, and of Lincoln. Already these 
ideals appear as "motifs" in our colonial history. The settlers 
of the seventeenth century, breaking away from Old World 
traditions, brought with them the habit of freedom. In the 
increasing claims of the colonial representative assemblies and 
in their resistance to political and commercial control by the 
officers of the crown we see the foreshadowing of American 
democracy. And, finally, the repeated attempts of the eight- 
eenth century to secure union in the face of the foe on our 
borders suggest the labors of Hamilton and Madison, of Web- 
ster and Lincoln, to make a United States the common home 
of our liberty and our democracy. 



CHAPTER II 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

The decree has gone forth . . . that a more equal liberty than has prevailed 
in other parts of the world must be established in America. — John Adams 

British Provocation 

Two facts of supreme importance summarize the colonial 
period of our history: England established an empire in 
America, and England lost an empire in America. The first of 
these facts we have studied in the preceding chapter. We turn 
now to the second fact, the separation of the American colonies 
from England — an event which Whitelaw Reid, former ambas- 
sador to the court of St. James, spoke of, with pardonable 
exaggeration, as the greatest event in modern history." 

All crises in history are the adjustment, often with the ex- 
plosive violence of revolution, of forces that have been long 
in preparation. The event is understood only in the causes 
of the event. When a revolution becomes inevitable it means 
simply that certain political, economic, or religious ideas have 
developed to a point where, in order to find their expression, 
they must burst asunder a political, economic, or religious 
order which refuses to adapt itself to their accommodation. 
The outbreak of revolution is not the beginning but the cul- 
mination of the process. So it was with the American Revo- 
lution. For a full century before the colonies threw off their 
allegiance to England independence was preparing. ^^The bot- 
tom of all the disorders," wrote Governor Hutchinson of 
Massachusetts, "is the opinion that every colony has a legis- 
lature in itself, the acts and doings of which are not to be 
controlled by Parliament." We have seen the colonies peti- 
tioning, protesting, evading, threatening, apologizing, until it 
seemed as if their connection with the mother country must 

55 



56 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



be worn down to the slender thread of a sentimental attach- 
ment. Before the middle of the eighteenth century they ap- 
peared to an enlightened traveler from Sweden as ^'likely in 
thirty or fifty years to form a state by themselves."^ They 
called themselves jurisdictions," and in the midst of protesta- 
tions of loyalty virtually defied the sovereignty of England. 
Had the officials of Charles II shown half the zeal in enforcing 
his orders and punishing the recalcitrant ^^patriots" of Massa- 
chusetts that George III showed in supporting the measures of 
Grenville and Townshend, the issue of American independence 
might have been settled an even century before the battle 
of Lexington. 

The triumph of Wolfe at Quebec brought a great change in 
the relations between England and the colonies. For England 
it meant the sudden acquisition of an enormous empire, with 
the national debt doubled and the burdens for the defense of 
dominions ^^on which the sun never set" multipHed many fold. 
For America it meant the removal of the French danger on 
the north and of the Spanish danger on the south. There was 
no longer place for the fear so naively expressed by a farmer 
of customs under Charles II (1664), that if the colonies did 
not maintain the honor and reputation of his Majesty who 
protected their trade and navigation, they would be subject 
to be devoured by strangers." Long before the expulsion of 
the French from America astute political philosophers like 
Montesquieu, d'Argenson, and Turgot had remarked on the 
likelihood that the colonies would eventually separate from 
England as the ripe fruit falls from the tree. But it was the 
conquest of Canada that removed, with ^Hhe turbulent Gal- 
licks," the only check on the prophetic destiny of America. 
On hearing of the Peace of Paris, Vergennes, the French 
ambassador at Constantinople, remarked that England would 
repent of having put an end to French rule in Canada. ^^The 
colonies," he said, stand no longer in need of England's pro- 
tection. She will call on them to help contribute toward 



iPeter Kaim, "Travels in North America," Vol. I, p. 265. 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



57 



supporting the burden they have helped to bring on her, and 
they will answer by striking off all dependence." 

The cession of Canada, however, was not the cause of 
America's rising. That cause was rather a change of behavior 
on the part of England toward the colonies, which coincided 
with and was partly occasioned by the cession of Canada. 
George Grenville became prime minister two months after 
the Treaty of Paris was signed (April, 1763). He it was who 
was chiefly responsible for the introduction of a new policy 
in Parliament; namely, taxing the American colonies for the 
sake of raising a revenue. Grenville did not invent the idea. 
Many times during the eighteenth century English officials 
at home and in America had suggested such a measure, but 
neither Walpole nor Pitt had been willing to sanction it.^ That 
Grenville did so was due partly to a change in the English 
government with the accession of George III and partly to a 
change in the condition of the British Empire after the Peace 
of Paris. 

George III was a pedant. He was neither dull-witted nor 
cruel-hearted, but opinionated and obstinate. He was often 
called a tyrant by Patrick Henry and other ardent American 
patriots, but he was rather a theorist than a tyrant. He had 
"ideas" on kingship — and they were a hundred years behind 
the times. He was an indefatigable politician, but the results 
of his policy were always compromised by his serene confi- 
dence in his own sagacity. He had no genius for conciliation, 
resisting concession until it was too late to make it appear as 
a gracious favor. His education was of the meanest sort, 
acquired in the early surroundings of waiting-women's flattery 
and indulgent chaperonage. Vaulting ambition dwelt in his 
small mind. He would rule his realm as kings of old had 
ruled. He demanded ministers loyal to the kingly prerogative 
above all else : Butes and Grenvilles, Graftons and Norths — 

customs officer at Boston proposed an elaborate plan of colonial taxation 
in 1722, with stamp duties, land tax, excise on liquors, import duties, etc. When 
Walpole was urged to adopt such a policy he replied that he had half of old Eng- 
land against him and that he didn't care to add the enmity of the new England. 



58 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



obsequious, sententious, and vain. The large wisdom of Pitt, 
Burke, or Fox appeared to him as only factious opposition 
encouraging rebels in their folly. Descending to the commonest 
levels of political jobbery, he distributed what he jocosely 
called in a letter to Lord North his ^'gold pills" to secure seats 
in Parliament for men who would blindly follow the royal 
program and hoot or hiss down the repeated remonstrances 
of real statesmen. ^'He spent a long life," says the English 
historian Lecky, ^^in obstinately resisting measures which are 
now almost universally admitted to be good, and in supporting 
measures which are now as universally admitted to have been 
bad." Thomas Jefferson was not wrong when he attributed 
the accumulated grievances v/hich led the American colonies to 
declare their independence not to the ministers, the Parliament, 
or the people of England, but to King George III. 

Such a man it was England's ill fortune to have at the head 
of the state at one of the most critical moments of her his- 
tory. William Pitt had created an empire in two hemispheres. 
George III obliged him to turn it over to himself. Infinite 
tact was needed to integrate the parts of this empire, to recon- 
cile habits of self-government in America with imperial alle- 
giance, to distribute equally the burden of debt and defense, 
to adopt commercial codes for the benefit of a trade spread 
over three oceans. But George III and his obsequious ministers 
proceeded to handle the empire as if it were a medieval fief 
or a royal demesne. 

The plan of management for the American part of the em- 
pire was announced by Grenville in various meetings of Par- 
liament in the autumn of 1763 and the spring of 1764. It was 
entirely after the heart of the king, who in proroguing Parlia- 
ment on April 19^ 1764, spoke enthusiastically of ^^the wise 
regulations" which had been established ^Ho augment the 
public revenues, to unite the interests of the most distant 
possessions of the crown, and to encourage their commerce 
with Great Britain." That is just v/hat the measures of Gren- 
ville were meant to do. How well they succeeded, the events of 
another nineteenth of April, eleven years later, tell. It was a 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



59 



threefold scheme that Grenville proposed: (i) to establish a 
permanent military force in America ; (2 ) to stiffen and enforce 
the Acts of Trade ; (3) to raise a revenue in America by parlia- 
mentary taxation. These three measures," says Lecky, ^^pro- 
duced the American Revolution." They were regarded by the 
colonists as the beginning of their woes, for in all future prot- 
estations their cry for relief was for a return to the state of 
affairs existing before the Grenville legislation. Edmund Burke 
said that prior to 1764 the attitude of the colonies was ^^one of 
acquiescence."^ 

Grenville's measures were inspired by the condition of the 
empire immediately following the triumph over the French. 
An immense territory had been added to the British crown 
and a double burden of debt to the British exchequer.^ Quebec 
on the north, and East and West Florida on the south (see map, 
p. 53 ) , were organized into royal provinces, but under absolute 
governors, as the provinces had too few English inhabitants to 
furnish assemblies. The great tract between the Alleghenies and 
the Mississippi was to be kept for a while under control of the 
crown as unorganized territory. The Indians in it had been 
transferred by the Treaty of Paris from French to English 
allegiance, but that did not hinder the French from fomenting 
attacks by the Indians on their new masters. In the mid- 
summer of 1763 the formidable Ottawa chieftain Pontiac 
roused the redskins to the last desperate effort to recover the 
lands of their fathers from the European intruders. He cap- 
tured every fort between the Ohio and Lake Erie and laid siege 

lit is useless to seek the origin of the American Revolution in any single 
event. James Otis in his speech at Boston on the Writs of Assistance, in 1761, 
had declared that any act that violated the essential rights of British subjects 
was void ; and Patrick Henry in his famous plea in the Parsons' Cause at 
Williamsburg, in 1763, asserted that the king might forfeit his subjects' 
obedience by breaking his part of the contract to defend their liberties. Henry 
even spoke the word tyrant " and heard murmurs of " treason ! " But these 
were local quarrels, whereas Grenville's measures ^vere the announcement of a 
general colonial policy — the first since the Stuart period. 

2 The British debt between the Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) and Paris 
(1763) increased from £72,000,000 to £139,000,000. In the same period the 
expense of the American establishment grew from £70,000 to £350,000. 



6o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



to Pittsburgh and Detroit. In order to have a free hand to 
deal with the Indians and to prevent the colonies from a 
rapid growth beyond his control by westward expansion, King 
George, in October, 1763, issued a proclamation running a Hne 
along the crest of the Alleghenies and ordered all colonists who 
had either willfully or inadvertently seated themselves'' on 
land west of this line ^'forthwith to remove themselves from 
such settlements." 

While the king was thus hemming in the colonists between 
the Alleghenies and the Atlantic he thought it advisable to 
place a garrison of 10,000 troops in America. The British 
commanders had complained bitterly of the quality of the 
American soldiers in the French war. Even General Wolfe, 
on hearing of Abercrombie's defeat at Ticonderoga, called the 
Americans ^Hhe dirtiest and most contemptible cowardly dogs 
that you can conceive." Some colonies, like Connecticut and 
Massachusetts, had given liberally and felt that they had done 
more than their share in defense.^ Others had refused to con- 
tribute, because their borders were not threatened, or because 
they were too busy baiting their governors to think of the 
common danger to the empire. England had been in the habit 
of making money grants to the colonies to recompense them 
for mihtary expenditures. In the years from 1759 to 1761 
she had reimbursed the colonies to the extent of £200,000. 
Would it not be better to replace this haphazard system of 
requisitions and compensation by a regular army supported 
by funds to which the colonies should contribute a certain 
quota by a uniform system of taxation? Ireland, poor and 
burdened as she was, supported an army of 1 2 ,000 for imperial 
defense. Nothing was said in the Grenville acts of the deter- 
rent effects of a regular military establishment in America on 

ipor example, the war expenses of Massachusetts were i8i8,ooo, of which 
£160,000 remained in 1763 to be paid by provincial taxatipn. John Hancock, a 
merchant of Boston, declared that he was taxed more heavily than any man in 
England. Virginia had incurred in the war a debt of £385,000 ; Pennsylvania, of 
£313,000; New York, of £291,000; Connecticut, of £259,000 — all sums far in 
excess of what was remitted by the British Parliament. 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



6i 



the growth of the sentiment of ^'independency/' but without 
doubt that aspect of the plan was not entirely overlooked by 
the ministry. Any scheme to increase the number of royal 
officials in America would help to tighten the imperial bond. 

But the chief of all agencies for tightening this bond would 
be the vigorous enforcement of the Acts of Trade, which had 
fallen into sad neglect. Two parts of the Old Colonial System 
were fairly well observed, because they brought little incon- 
venience to the American merchant.^ But the act of 1663, 
requiring European goods to be brought to the colonies only 
via England, was constantly violated. One writer estimates 
that goods to the value of £750,000 were smuggled into the 
colonies directly from European ports in the year 1765. More- 
over, the notorious Sugar and Molasses Act of 1733, designed 
to ruin the trade of the colonies with the French and Dutch 
West Indies, was a dead letter. Tens of thousands of hogs- 
heads of molasses were imported into Massachusetts and Rhode 
Island annually, and only the most trifling duties were col- 
lected.^ Of course, during the war with France such traffic was 
not only illicit but treasonable. Admiral Hawkes testified to 
the Board of Trade in 1750 that he ^'certainly would have 
taken Martinique if it had not been for the provisions with 
which North American vessels, to the knowledge of every 
captain of his squadron, supplied the French island." In the 
next war (i 755-1 763) Admirals Hawkes and Boscawen found 
that the illicit trade with the American mainland was all that 
kept the French Indies from ''utter collapse." William Pitt, 
indignant that any part of the empire should view the French 
as other than enemies, peremptorily ordered that the law of 
1733 be enforced, even if the navy had to be employed. 

1 Namely, the acts of 1651 and 1660, providing that the trade must be carried 
on in ships built, owned, and manned by British subjects and that the " enumer- 
ated" goods be sent only to English ports. 

2 The reports of the London customhouse show an average return of less 
than £1000 a year for duties on molasses under the act of 1733, whereas Rhode 
Island alone, had she paid the duty of 6d.^. gallon prescribed by the act, would 
have contributed £28,000 to the royal treasury. 



62 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The case seemed clear to the ministry, and they proceeded 
with confidence to formulate a plan for raising a revenue in 
America. In xApril, 1 764, the Sugar Act was passed. A duty of 
a gallon was kept on molasses — enough to ruin New Eng- 
land trade and force colonial capital into manufactures, which 
had been forbidden by the English statutes of the eighteenth 
century. Duties were also laid on wines, silks, cambrics, and 
other articles. The drawbacks which had been paid on Eu- 
ropean goods reexported from England to the colonies were 
canceled. New duties were made collectible in America. This 
last provision necessitated a corps of revenue officers in the 
colonial ports, the multiplication of admiralty courts, and the 
enlargement of naval operations on the American coast. Cer- 
tificates were required from ship captains, describing accurately 
the contents and destination of cargoes. Penalties for the 
infringement of the law were severe. It was evident that Eng- 
land had entered on a new policy of colonial control. Samuel 
Adams in a Boston town meeting (May, 1764) instructed the 
delegates to the IMassachusetts General Court to rebuke that 
assembly for not taking notice of ^Hhe intention of the British 
ministry to burden us with new taxes." Two months later 
James Otis, in his Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and 
Proved," invoked ^Hhe united application of all who feel ag- 
grieved" to seek redress. That sentiment of common interest 
among the colonies which the French war had not been able to 
stir was roused by the Grenville policy. 

It was estimated that the new taxes of 1764, with the saving 
of the drawbacks, would net about £45,000 a year to the 
British exchequer. But the cost of the militar}^ and fiscal 
machinery in America would amount to some £360.000, of which 
the colonies were to be asked to pay about a third. Grenville 
decided that the most effective method for raising the major 
part of the colonial revenue was the imposition of a stamp 
tax, which had been recommended several times during the 
eighteenth century. Still, he was willing to try any other method 
which the colonies had to suggest. He therefore only announced 
his intention of imposing a stamp tax and waited a full year 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



63 



for the proposition of a substitute tax by the colonies. Pro- 
tests from colonial agents against any kind of tax at all 
were ruled out of order — the British Parliament was not 
in the habit of receiving petitions against revenue bills. In 
February, 1765, a listless and half-empty House of Commons, 
by a vote of 205 to 49, and a still more listless and empty House 
of Lords, without division or debate, passed the Stamp Act, 
which, says Lecky, ^4f judged from its consequences, must 
be deemed one of the most momentous legislative acts in the 
history of mankind." 

To the astonishment of king and ministry the passage of the 
Stamp Act aroused a storm of opposition in America. Its en- 
forcement would have meant the thrusting of the hand of the 
taxgatherer into all the transactions of colonial business; for 
by the terms of its sixty printed pages all pamphlets and news- 
papers, all legal and commercial paper, — bills, bonds, leases, 
licenses, deeds, policies, diplomas, — must bear the stamp 
which certified that duties had been paid thereon. Ever since 
1673 England had collected slight duties in America; but 
these had been solely for the execution of the imperial com- 
mercial system,^ a right which the colonies never denied in 
principle, although they often chafed under its application. 
Even the duties of the Sugar Act of 1764, though manifestly 
levied for the purpose of revenue, could still be classed under 
the title regulation of trade." At any rate, the duties would 
be collected only in the ports of entry and would directly 
affect only the mercantile class, which had long been accus- 
tomed to its tiffs with collectors, naval officers, and admiralty 
judges. But the new stamps would be distributed all over the 
land. They would be in every court, shop, and printing-house. 
They would pass from hand to hand as a constant reminder 
of a tax imposed by a legislature three thousand miles distant 
in which no American sat. 

1 Small duties had been collected in American ports on tobacco, sugar, cotton, 
and ginger exported from one colony to another, in order to prevent these 
"enumerated" goods from evading the law of 1660 by reaching European ports 
through a double shipment. 



64 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Long before the day arrived for the distribution of the 
stamps (November i, 1765) the colonies were seething with 
protest. Patrick Henry^s resolutions in the Virginia assembly, 
on May 29, sounded "the alarm-bell to the disaffected." "The 
inhabitants of this colony/' he said, "are not bound to yield 
obedience to any law or ordinance imposing taxation upon 
them without their consent," for such actions "have a mani- 
fest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom." 
In June, James Otis of Massachusetts proposed a meeting of 
committees from the colonial assemblies to deal with "the 
threatened invasion of the rights of men of English tradition." 
In August, mobs in Boston hanged Lord Bute and Oliver (the 
stamp distributor) in effigy and sacked the elegant mansion of 
Chief Justice Hutchinson. In October, twenty-seven delegates 
from nine of the colonies met in the Stamp Act Congress at 
New York and joined in the first common protest of Americans 
to the British king and Parliament, claiming all the "inherent 
rights and liberties of the king's natural-born subjects." When 
the first of November arrived not an agent was found in 
America to distribute the stamps. They had all resigned. 

Even King George now realized that mischief was afoot. 
"I am more and more grieved," he wrote to Conway, "at the 
action of the Americans. Where this spirit will end is not to 
be said. It is undoubtedly the most serious matter that ever 
came before Parliament." When Parliament met, on Decem- 
ber 17, 1765, the enforcement of the Stamp Act became the 
absorbing subject. Burke declared that "the great contests for 
freedom in this country were from the earliest time chiefly on 
the question of taxation," and hailed the Americans as the 
descendants of the men who had withstood the illegal imposi- 
tions of Norman, Plantagenet, and Stuart kings. Pitt, asserting 
that the subject was the greatest that had ever engaged the 
attention of ParHament, except for the revolution of 1688, 
vindicated the resistance of America. "Taxation," he cried, 
"is no part of the governing or legislative power. The taxes 
are a voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. . . . The 
Commons of America, represented in their several assemblies, 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



65 



have ever had in their possession this constitutional right of 
granting their own money. ... I rejoice that America has 
resisted. Three milHons of people so dead to all the feelings 
of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have 
been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest." The mer- 
chants of England petitioned Parliament for the repeal of the 
act. Benjamin Franklin, summoned to the bar of the House 
of Commons, declared that there was not gold or silver enough 
in the colonies to pay the tax for a single year. The Rocking- 
ham cabinet, which had succeeded Grenville's, was opposed 
to the coercion of the colonies, and in March, 1766, the Stamp 
Act was repealed amid rejoicings which Burke declared un- 
precedented in the British Empire. The colonists voted statues 
to Pitt and King George. But no offer was made to raise the 
imperial funds; and Parliament coupled with the repeal a 
Declaratory Act, asserting their ^'full power and authority to 
make laws to bind the colonies and people of America ... in 
all cases whatsoever." 

The controversy over the Grenville legislation of 1 764-1 765 
illustrates every principle of the quarrel between Great Britain 
and the colonies. It revealed suddenly and sharply the diver- 
gent economic interests and political ideals which had been 
developing for a century and a half on both sides of the 
Atlantic. The colony of Rhode Island remonstrated with 
the Board of Trade against the act of 1764, declaring that the 
annual excess of their imports over their exports in trade with 
the mother country was £115,000, which balance they could 
pay only through their molasses trade with the (French) West 
Indies. But the English treasury officials called this trade 
stolen from the commerce of Great Britain, contrary to the 
fundamental principle of colonisation, to every maxim of 
policy, and to the express provisions of the law." The colonists 
denied the right of Parliament to tax them or even to legislate 
for them, since Parliament could not extend its power beyond 
its constituents, the people of Great Britain. For England to 
concede, however, that the colonial assemblies took the place 
of Parliament would be practically to concede America's 



66 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



independence. The king could not be the bond of union, as the 
colonists asserted that he was, because the king was not sover- 
eign in England. Parliament was sovereign there, and, accord- 
ing to the British view, the colonies as corporations were subject 
to the sovereign power of Parliament, while the individual 
inhabitants of the colonies enjoyed all the personal rights of 
English freemen. These were radically conflicting ideas, and 
it did not serve to clarify the situation when John Adams 
and James Otis appealed from the power of Parliament to a 
British ^^constitution" with which a law of Parliament might 
be in conflict. The English government knew no such con- 
stitution. It was the ^^higher law," or the inherent ^'rights of 
man," that the colonists were setting up.^ To follow that law 
against the positive law of the realm could have only one 
result — revolution. 

To the supporters of the ministry the arguments of the 
colonists seemed only sophistry to justify their disobedience. 
Their protestations of loyalty to the crown seemed only hy- 
pocrisy when coupled with defiance of the Parliament to which 
the crown itself was subordinate. ^'You say you are British 
subjects," cried Hutchinson, ^'and yet you suppose that you are 
constitutionally exempt from one of the obligations which 
British subjects are under. But if you are exempt from one, 
you are exempt from all, and so are not British subjects at all." 
As to the colonists' argument that they were not represented 
in Parliament, who gave them the right to dictate their own 
provincial theories of representation to the sovereign body? 
All the non-noble subjects of the British crown were repre- 
sented in the House of Commons, wherever they lived. If 
Philadelphia and New York had no delegates at Westminster, 
neither had Manchester and Sheffield ! 

iThe Pennsylvania assembly was the first to voice the doctrine of "natural 
rights," vi^hich became the main argument of Thomas Jefferson and other radi- 
cals as the Revolution approached. The assembly declared that the government 
of Pennsylvania was "founded on the natural rights of man and is or ought to 
be perfectly free." It would be hard to find any justification for this language 
in the charter of Pennsylvania, which, curiously enough, was the only Stuart 
charter that expressly reserved to Parliament the right to tax the colony. 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



67 



The case seemed perfectly clear to George Ill's ministers. 
They had imposed a reasonable tax on America, in a consider- 
ate manner, through the sovereign body of the empire. The 
case seemed equally clear to the American patriots." They had 
levied their own taxes in their assemblies since the earliest days. 
They looked on this privilege as the chief guarantee of their 
liberty. They had no members sitting in the British Parliament, 
and hence no way of redress in case of unfair or oppressive 
legislation. Here the matter rested, with the repeal of the Stamp 
Act in 1766; and here it might have rested indefinitely if the 
British ministry had stood by the repeal. The question was not 
settled: it was deadlocked. 

The agitation stirred in 1765 and the relief manifested in 
1766 would have convinced a wiser ministry and king that the 
revenues anticipated from America by taxation were of trifling 
value compared with the harmony of the empire. The British 
ministry, however, was not willing to let the matter rest. The 
alternate advance and retreat in the decade following the Gren- 
ville legislation, the ^'blundering into a policy one day and 
blundering out of it the next," as Burke called it in his famous 
^'Speech on Conciliation" in 17 74, represented the dogged vacil- 
lation of the Tory ministers of George III. The repeal of the 
Stamp Act marked the abandonment of the attempt to raise 
a revenue in America by internal taxation," leaving the 
colonies apparently the victors — ''a fatal compliance," as 
George III said a few years later. When Charles Townshend 
returned to the charge in 1767, it was on the ground of exter- 
nal taxation," or imperial trade regulation, a right grudgingly 
conceded by the colonies at the beginning of their fight on the 
stamp duties. But that fight had raised in them a spirit of 
protest against any kind of taxation by the British Parliament. 
Townshend's duties on painters' colors, paper, glass, and tea 
were resented only less defiantly than Grenville's stamps.^ 

^The Townshend Acts were especially odious in that they authorized Writs 
of Assistance to search men's private premises for smuggled goods and greatly 
enlarged the personnel of the customs department in America. These measures 
were only the belated execution of the Navigation Acts of 1672 and 1696, but 



68 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Nonimportation agreements, evasions, smuggling, and intim- 
idation followed on protests in the colonies. Samuel Adams 
of Massachusetts drew up a letter, in February, 1768, to be 
communicated to the colonial assembhes, in which he advanced 
the astonishing theor}^ that ''His Majesty's ro3^al predecessors 
were graciously pleased to form a subordinate legislature here, 
that their subjects might enjoy the inalienable right of repre- 
sentation." Imagine such a thought's having crossed the mind 
of Charles I when he granted the ^Massachusetts charter of 
1629 — just at the moment when he dismissed his Parhament 
in England and started on his eleven years of ''personal rule" ! 
When the ]\Iassachusetts assembly refused by a vote of 92 to 
17 to withdraw the letter, two British regiments were sent to 
Boston to awe the inhabitants into obedience. Roughs baited 
the redcoats in the streets, pelting them with brickbats and 
calling them "lobsters" and "bloody-backs." In the riot that 
followed (March, 1770) five men were killed. The funeral of 
these victims of the "Boston INIassacre" was made the occa- 
sion for a popular demonstration engineered by Samuel Adams ; 
and each anniversary of the affray was celebrated in Boston 
with incendiary speeches against British t}Tanny, until the 
national fete of the Fourth of July furnished a nobler patriotic 
holiday. After the "massacre" the troops were withdrawn and 
the Townshend duties repealed (except for a trifling tax on 
tea). Therewith the attempt of Parliament to raise a revenue 
in America was abandoned. 

For three years thereafter there was comparative calm. The 
colonies were hardly mentioned in Parliament. Their trade 
with England revived, imports rising from £1,634,000 in 1769 
to £4,200,000 in 1 771. In spite of the efforts of the radicals 
to prevent the importation and sale of tea, a good deal of 
that article found its way into the houses of the colonial 
dames. The British East India Company had 17.000.000 

they were resisted as encouraging " a swarm of office-holders to live on the fruits 
of colonial labor and industr^^" At the same moment (June, 1767) the assembly 
of New York was suspended for refusing to obey a Quartering Act which was a 
part of the Grenville legislation. 



JHE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



69 



pounds of tea stored in warehouses in England, on which they 
would have to pay a duty of a shilling a pound before they 
could dispose of it in Great Britain. The company was finan- 
cially embarrassed, and the ministry proposed the wily scheme 
of benefiting its shareholders in England and furnishing it 
with customers in America by drawing back the shilling duty 
and allowing the company to sell the tea in the colonies, subject 
only to the duty of 3d. a pound in America. The revenue to 
the crown would be trifling. The object was rather to tempt 
the colonies to acknowledge the authority of the British Par- 
liament to tax them. As Lord North bluntly confessed, ^^The 
King meant to try the case in America."^ The result of the 
trial" is well known. Not an ounce of the 2051 chests of 
tea sent to America was received by the consignees. The ships 
arriving at Philadelphia and New York were sent back with 
their cargoes intact. The tea that was landed at Charleston 
was seized by the authorities of the province and afterwards 
sold at auction for the benefit of the American cause. The 
people of Boston having failed to persuade Governor Hutch- 
inson (two of whose sons were among the consignees) to 
give clearance papers for the three tea ships anchored at 
Griffin's wharf, a band of citizens disguised as Mohawk Indians 
boarded the ships in the evening of December 16, 1773, and, 
ripping open 342 chests of tea, dumped the contents into Boston 
Harbor. 

In this semi tragic, semicomic act ended the Grenville policy 
inaugurated a decade earlier. It had been contracted to nar- 
rower and pettier lines by Townshend and Lord North, until it 
dwindled down to a tricky attempt to enforce a three-penny 
tax. The destruction of the tea drew down upon the people of 
Massachusetts the first punitive measures of the British govern- 
ment. The cup of the colony's offense was full to the brim. 
The Otises, Warrens, Quincys, and, above all, the brace of 
Adamses" had aroused a spirit of rebellion and organized an 

iThe king wrote to North in September, 1774, that he had "no inclination for 
the present to lay fresh taxes," but that there "must always be one tax to keep 
up the right." 



70 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



"invisible government"^ which must be put down once for all. 
A series of acts of Parliament in the spring of 1774 (called by 
the colonists "the Intolerable Acts") sounded the challenge to 
submission or defiance. The port of Boston was closed until 
the colony should pay the East India Company for the tea 
destroyed. The charter of 1691 was practically abrogated, 
the choice of various executive officers being transferred from 
the people to the royal governor. The town meeting was for- 
bidden to assemble without the governor's permission, except 
for the routine business of elections. A new Quartering Act 
required the province to provide lodging and food for British 
soldiers. Officers or magistrates charged with murder in sup- 
pressing riots or executing revenue laws could be sent to Eng- 
land for trial. Thomas Hutchinson, the ablest of the royal 
governors of Massachusetts, left for England in June, 1774, 
and was succeeded by General Gage, who declared that with 
four regiments of soldiers he could quell the rebellious spirit of 
the colony: "They will be lions while we are lambs, but if we 
take the resolute part they will prove very meek." 

The British government thought that it was punishing a prov- 
ince, but found that it was declaring war on America. The 
colonies, from New Hampshire to South Carolina, made the 
cause of Massachusetts their own. Food and money were sent 
to relieve the inhabitants of Boston from the distress caused 
by the closing of her port. The Virginia Burgesses adopted 
Jefferson's resolution appointing the day on which the Boston 
port bill went into effect as a day of humiliation and prayer, 
"to give us one heart and mind firmly to oppose every injury to 
American rights ; and that the minds of his Majesty and par- 

1 Samuel Adams had formed Committees of Correspondence among all the 
towns of the province in 1772. They were unofficial groups of patriots to keep 
alive the agitation against the British governors "when the flame of liberty 
burned low." The Tor\' pamphleteer Daniel Leonard called these committees 
*'the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent ever issued from the egg of 
sedition." Thomas Jefferson, through whose influence the committees were made 
intercolonial, wrote many years later (181 8) to Governor Tyler of Virginia, "To 
these little republics [of New England] we owe the vigor given to the Revolution 
at its com.mencement in the eastern States." 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



71 



liament may be inspired from above with wisdom, moderation, 
and justice." For this impertinence the House of Burgesses 
was promptly dissolved by the governor, but the members, 
meeting informally at the Raleigh Tavern, sent out the call for 
an annual congress of all the colonies. One after another the 
colonies fell into line, until all but Georgia had chosen delegates. 
On the fifth day of September, 1774, the fifty-five members of 
the First Continental Congress met in Carpenter's Hall, at 
Philadelphia. America was organized. From this time forth 
there was a public body, representative of the common interests 
of her colonies. The Continental Congress laid the foundation 
of the American federal nation. 

The Declaration of Independence 

Protest, nullification, armed resistance, independence, — these 
are the steps in the reply of the colonies to what they deemed 
British oppression. The stages are not sharply defined. There 
were some colonial leaders, no doubt, who early became con- 
vinced that they could never preserve their liberties in con- 
nection with the British Empire ; and there were many who had 
not advanced beyond the stage of protest when the majority 
were ready for independence. There is no one of the leaders, 
from the radical Patrick Henry to the conservative Dickinson 
or Galloway, whose views we can call typical" in the decade 
succeeding the Stamp Act. The transactions of the First Con- 
tinental Congress, however, were a long step toward the con- 
solidation of public opinion in America; for the common 
statement of grievances there presented and the adoption of a 
colony-wide plan for the boycott of British trade may be called 
the first expression of the will of a united America. 

The Congress was radical. Its members had been chosen by 
Committees of Correspondence, Committees of Safety, or pro- 
vincial mass meetings^ and in only two instances (Massa- 
chusetts and Pennsylvania) by colonial legislatures. On the 
motion of Samuel Adams it forthwith indorsed the Suffolk 
Resolves, in which the patriots of the county containing the 



72 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



rebellious town of Boston had declared that the Intolerable Acts 
were void, had instructed the tax collectors not to pay the public 
money over to the king's officers, and had even advised the in- 
habitants of the town to train a militia force and to elect dele- 
gates to a provincial congress to govern the colony in place of 
the legislature under General Gage. This was a virtual decla- 
ration of independence. Joseph Galloway, a conservative dele- 
gate from Pennsylvania, proposed a plan, which was approved 
by the Earl of Chatham (Pitt) and several other leading Whigs 
in England, for a permanent congress of the united colonies at 
Philadelphia, with power to concur with Parliament in all 
legislation affecting America. But Galloway's plan was rejected, 
and even the report of it was expunged from the journals of 
Congress. Instead, there was adopted a ^^Declaration of Rights 
and Grievances," a kind of ultimatum to Great Britain, in which 
the extreme claims of the colonies were put forward. It called 
for the repeal of a dozen acts passed since the Grenville 
ministry, especially the Intolerable Acts, which were character- 
ized as ^^mpolitick, unjust, cruel, and unconstitutional." The 
colonists migrating from their mother country, it claimed, lost 
none of their rights, which were based on the immutable laws of 
nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several 
charters or compacts."^ An agreement called the ^^Association," 
boycotting both import and export trade with Great Britain, 
a petition to the king, and addresses to the inhabitants of 
the province of Quebec,^ to the people of England, and to the 

iNote the order of the sources from which these rights are derived. Thomas 
Jefferson sent to the Virginia convention — which met in August, 1774, to choose 
delegates to the Congress— a paper containing a draft of instructions to the mem- 
bers, which was printed under the title, "A Summary View of the Rights of Brit- 
ish America." Next to Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" the "Summary View" 
was the most influential of all the Revolutionary pamphlets. It contains the first 
clear statement in modern history of the doctrine of expatriation, claiming that the 
emigrants to the American colonies were released from all connection with Great 
Britain except their voluntary allegiance to the crown. Parliament was as "for- 
eign " a body for them as the Spanish cortes or the diet of the Holy Roman Em- 
pire ! Jefferson called the Continental Congress " your great American Council." 

2 The Congress exposed itself to not a little ridicule from the Tories for its in- 
consistency in the addresses to the English people and to the Canadians. In the 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



73 



American colonists completed the series of papers put forth by 
the Congress. Chatham declared them unrivaled for ^'soHdity 
of reason, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion." The 
Congress adjourned in October, 1774, to meet again in the 
following May in case their grievances were not redressed. 

Before we study under what changed and exciting conditions 
the Congress reconvened on May 10, 1775, it is well to examine 
the theory which underlay the Declaration of Rights and 
Grievances. It has often been remarked that the Americans 
of the Revolutionary epoch were far closer to their ancestors 
of the seventeenth century than to contemporary Englishmen. 
Certain it is that Hooker's remark in the ^'Ecclesiastical PoHty," 
that ^'governments cannot be legitimate unless resting on the 
consent of the governed/' and John Locke's theory in the ''Essay 
on Civil Government," that "men naturally free, equal, and 
independent form political societies in which they delegate to 
a government certain restricted powers for securing the tran- 
quiUity, the safety and welfare of the people," seemed like 
self-evident truths to the colonists. Their ancestors had left 
the homeland in great numbers in the seventeenth century for 
the sake of vindicating these truths. All their traditions were 
those of compact between free and equal people, whether 
associating in the commercial companies of Virginia and the 
Carolinas or building the Congregational churches of the 
Northern colonies, or laying the foundations for the little "body 
poHtick" in the cabin of the Mayflower. They did not have 
to learn the doctrine of government as a public service, because 
they had never, from the days of Archbishop Laud to the days 
of Lord North, allowed the practice of government as a divine 
right to be established on these shores. 

This sense of their dignity as English freemen, inherited from 
their ancestors of the seventeenth century, was strengthened by 
the philosophy of the eighteenth century, which taught the 

former it raised the bogy of Roman Catholicism, accusing George III of trying 
to fasten "popery" on all the colonies, as James II had tried to fasten it on Eng- 
land ; while in the latter it cited the case of Switzerland to show how Protestant 
and Catholic could dwell together in unity. 



74 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



natural, inalienable rights of the individual and his unlimited 
perfectibility. Every act of authority outside the ^'natural" 
sphere of parentage^ guardianship, or such necessary personal 
relationships verged toward tyranny. Political associations 
arose out of the ^'social compact" and were simply the ex- 
pression of the nature and constitution of man in the relations 
he has to the beings that surround him." ]Men ceased in this 
doctrine to be the creatures of the state and became its creators. 
''The sovereign," said Jefferson in 1774, ^'has had rights and 
the people only privileges till now. This rule must be reversed. 
It is the people who have all the rights and the sovereigns have 
only very limited privileges." 

The events of the ten years between the Grenville legislation 
and the meeting of the Continental Congress revealed how far 
apart were the men of English speech and blood on both sides 
of the Atlantic. To the British government, and doubtless to 
a great majority of the English people,^ the behavior of the 
colonists in that decade seemed like wailful rebellion. English 
statesmen knew nothing of that fictitious constitution," above 
Parliament and the king, which by conferring ''natural rights" 
on the colonists as men allowed them to slip out of their respon- 
sibilities as subjects. It was a much more serious thing than 
''mutual misunderstanding" between England and her colonies. 
It w^as rather mutual despite for political ideals, w^hich each 
side cherished the more tenaciously under opposition, that led 
to the break. The year 1774 had not closed before George III 
had stated the dilemma in a letter to Lord North: "We 
must either master them or totally leave them to themselves 
as aliens." 

When the Continental Congress reconvened on May 10, 
1775, it was confronted by "a condition and not a theory." 

^We must not be deceived by the Whig orators in Parliament into believing 
that they represented the English nation. Lord North was more popular than 
Edmund Burke. Thomas Hutchinson, who returned from the governorship of 
Massachusetts to England in the autunm of 1774, wrote back, "I am persuaded 
that there never has been a time when the nation in general was so united 
against the colonies." 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



75 



The king had rejected the petition of 1774. Chatham, eulogiz- 
ing the Congress and demanding the withdrawal of the British 
troops from Boston, had secured but eighteen votes in the 
House of LordS; while both branches of Parliament by large 
majorities assured the king of their support at all hazards 
to put down rebellion." The Massachusetts ^'minutemen" had 
already faced the British redcoats, musket in hand, on Lexing- 
ton green and at Concord bridge. Sixteen thousand New 
England farmers, armed with their old smooth-bores and 
blunderbusses of the French and Indian wars, were closing in 
upon Gage's regiments in Boston. On May 16 the provincial 
congress of Massachusetts wrote to the Continental Congress 
at Philadelphia, asking it to take command of the army around 
Boston ^'for the general defence of the rights of America" and 
to devise a government for the country. It was too late to 
avoid bloodshed. Congress must either put itself at the head 
of such union as there was in America or leave the colonies to 
anarchy and New England to the vengeance of the British 
troops. It did not hesitate in its choice. George Washington 
was appointed commander of the ^^continental army" in June, 
and on July 6 Congress issued a spirited ^^Declaration of Causes 
for Taking up Arms." ^^We are reduced to the alternative of 
chusing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritable 
ministers or resistance by force. The latter is our choice. We 
have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dread- 
ful as voluntary slavery. Our cause is just. Our union is 
perfect. . . . We mean not to dissolve that union [between 
England and the colonies] which has so long and so happily 
existed and which we sincerely wish to see restored. Necessity 
has not yet driven us to that desperate measure. ... In 
defence of the freedom which is our birthright we have taken 
up arms. We shall lay them down when hostility shall cease 
on the part of our aggressors." 

Some of the delegates had come to the second meeting of the 
Continental Congress ready to follow Samuel Adams in declar- 
ing immediate independence, seizing the king's officers, and 
soliciting the aid of France and Spain. But the conservatives 



76 



THE UXITED STATES OF AMERICA 



were numerous enough to persuade the Congress again to 
''whine in the Style of humble petitioners'' to the king. In a 
dutiful memorial John Dickinson protested the attachment 
of the colonists to "his ^Majesty's person, family, and govern- 
ment," deplored the common misfortune to Englishmen on both 
sides of the Atlantic should fratricidal strife divide them, and 
begged George III by healing the dispute to transmit his name 
to posterity adorned with that signal and lasting glory that 
has attended the memory of those illustrious personages whose 
virtues and abilities have extricated states from dangerous 
conditions, and by securing happiness to others have erected 
the most noble and durable monuments to their own fame." 
Dickinson mistook his man. It was not for George III but for 
George Washington that this lofty service and this enduring 
fame were reserved. 

Every month of the session of Congress gave fresh proof 
of the impossibility of effecting a reconciliation. The king 
proclaimed the colonies in a state of rebellion, prohibited all 
trade and intercourse with them, set fire to their towns, and 
hired German soldiers to reduce them to obedience. Congress, 
on the other hand, maintained an army in active opposition to 
the royal governor of ^Massachusetts, appointed diplomatic 
agents to approach the courts of Europe for aid, and recom- 
mended the patriots of Xew Hampshire. South Carolina, and 
Virginia to follow the lead of ^Massachusetts in establishing 
such a form of government as would "best produce the hap- 
piness of the people and secure peace and good order during the 
continuance of the present dispute between Great Britain and 
the colonies." It is hard to imagine what further act of sover- 
eignty the Congress could perform : and yet it deferred the 
declaration of the independence of America a full year from 
the day when it so confidently announced the justice of the 
colonies' taking up arms against their king. 

Was it fidelity, caution, fear, or calculation that postponed 
so long the declaration of American independence? This 
question cannot be answered in a word. Pages could be filled 
with the protestations of loyalty uttered by leading Americans 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



77 



in the decade preceding the battle of Lexington.^ Hypocrisy 
and lip service ! cry the Tory historians of the Revolution. But 
we need not attribute hypocrisy to men like Washington and 
Jefferson, Franklin and Adams, to explain their protestations 
of loyalty to the British Empire in the midst of their resistance 
to parliamentary legislation. The very empire, as they under- 
stood it, was the guaranty of certain immemorial rights, and 
in the invasion of those rights they saw the danger of the dis- 
solution of the empire. Their case was like that of many 
men of the South in the decade preceding the Civil War. 
Alexander H. Stephens protested to the last, vigorously and 
honestly, his love for the Union — so long as it should guarantee 
what he considered to be the constitutional rights of the 
American commonwealths. He became the vice president of 
the Confederacy. 

But aside from sentimental attachment to Great Britain, 
there were certain very practical considerations which held the 
colonies back from a final break. Until they should be prepared 
to act in unison a proclamation of their independence would be 
rash and premature. In spite of the brave words of July 6, 
1775, the union of the colonies was not ^'perfect," however just 
their cause. As late as January, 1776, New York, Pennsylvania, 
Maryland, and New Jersey instructed their delegates in Con- 
gress to vote against independence. Unless they all ^^hung 
together," as Richard Penn remarked with grim humor, they 
were all likely to ^'hang separately." To confess themselves 
rebels would close the door to reconciliation. And to fail in their 

^Some of the most pronounced of these remarks are: "Independence, which 
none but rebels, fools, or madmen will contend for" (James Otis, 1765) ; "I have 
never heard in any conversation from any person drunk or sober the least 
expression of a wish for separation from England" (Benjamin Franklin, 1774) ; 
" That there are any who pant after independence is the greatest slander on the 
province [of Massachusetts!]" (John Adams, 1775); "Until after the rejection 
of the second petition of Congress, I never heard an American of any class or 
description express a wish for independence" (John Jay) ; "It is well known 
that in July, 1775, a separation from Great Britain and the establishment of a 
Republican Government had not yet entered into any person's mind" (Thomas 
Jefferson, 1782) ; "I am well satisfied that no such thing [as independence] is 
desired by any thinkmg man in all North America" (George Washington, 1774), 



78 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



rebellion would be to offer their heads to the executioner. 
"Congress gave signal proof of their indulgence," wrote Jef- 
ferson, "and of their great desire not to go too fast for any 
respectable part of our body." 

If some feared anarchy, others feared despotism. There was 
a deep-seated apprehension among the people of the new states 
that their liberties might be encroached on by Congress. 
George Ill's government was offensive, to be sure; but might 
not a victorious general here subdue the states to a submission 
the more deplorable as it would be self-invited, and the more 
intolerable as its agents would be near at hand? Was it not 
better to correct the ills they had than to fly to others that they 
knew not of? And might there not perhaps be some truth in 
the contemptuous irony with which Dean Tucker of Gloucester 
had dismissed the whole question: "Independence would be a 
cheap and excellent punishment for the colonies"? 

The natural reluctance of the commercial classes on both 
sides of the Atlantic to have their profitable connection broken 
was another deterrent from independence. In the debates on the 
nonintercourse agreement, in September, 1774, Samuel Chase 
of Maryland predicted that bankruptcy for England would re- 
sult if the measure were adopted. "Two thirds of the Colonies," 
he said, "are clothed in British manufactures." Richard Henry 
Lee (who later proposed the motion for independence) thought 
that the same ship that carried the nonimportation resolutions 
to England would bring back the redress. George III and his 
political allies had to be on the alert to combat the commercial 
pacifists who rose in Parliament to present petitions from the 
merchants of their towns and counties praying for an accom- 
modation with the colonies for the salvation of their trade. 

Finally, English politics complicated the question of 
American independence. If the postponement of the decla- 
ration tended to unite opinion in America, it also tended to 
divide opinion in Great Britain. So long as the colonies held 
to their allegiance they might hope to win sympathy across the 
water. The Whig statesmen, from Burke to Barre, who ap- 
proved America's resistance to Grenville's, Townshend's, and 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



79 



North's legislation, were a unit in their condemnation of seces- 
sion. ^'I rejoice that America has resisted! " cried Pitt in the 
debate on the repeal of the Stamp Act; but still he asserted 
in 1774 that if he believed the Americans entertained ^'the most 
distant intention of throwing off the legislative supremacy of 
Great Britain/' he would be the first to enforce British author- 
ity ^'by every effort the country was capable of making." Some 
unforeseen turn of affairs might at any moment overthrow the 
Tory government in England and bring the friends of American 
rights into power. It had happened in 1765, in the case of 
Grenville and Rockingham, with the glorious result of the re- 
peal of the Stamp Act. A successor to Lord North might 
undo the Intolerable Acts. Anyway, it was better to wait. The 
population and wealth of the colonies were growing rapidly. 
If separation must come, the longer it was delayed the easier 
its accomplishment would be. 

Such considerations, added to the natural inertia of a pros- 
pering people,^ the lack of a definite and universal mandate to 
Congress from the states, and the serious risk involved in openly 
proclaiming themselves rebels, make it a wonder rather that 
independence was declared at all than that it was declared so 
late. We have abundant testimony from men who certainly 
would not overrate the amount of British sympathy in the 
colonies that during the whole of the war at least one third of 
the people of America were opposed to the separation. In 
New York and some of the Southern states the Tories were 
probably in the majority. Lecky, in an oft-quoted sentence, 
has summed up the situation admirably: ^^The American Rev- 
olution, like most others, was the work of an energetic 
minority who succeeded in committing an undecided and fluctu- 
ating majority to courses for which they had little love, and 
leading them step by step to a position from which it was 
impossible to recede." 

iThe bishop of Derry (Ireland) in a curious letter to Lord Dartmouth, 
May 23, 1775, declared that a large part of the revolutionary sentiment in the 
colonies was due to the migration from Ireland, within a few years, of ''over 
30,000 fanatical and hungry republicans." 



8o 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The die was cast on July 2, 1776, when Congress passed Lee's 
motion that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to 
be, free and independent states ; that they are absolved from all 
allegiance to the British crown; and that all political con- 
nection betweeen them and the state of Great Britain is, and 
ought to be, totally dissolved." Two days later, Thomas Jeffer- 
son's draft of a ''Declaration of Independence" was adopted.^ 
It was based on the political doctrines that governments exist 
by the consent of the governed, for the purpose of securing to 
men their inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit 
of happiness; and that revolution is a sacred duty when 
governments seek to destroy or invade those rights. It was an 
apology, published out of ''a decent respect for the opinions 
of mankind," submitting to a candid world the proofs of a 
"long train of abuses and usurpations" practiced by George 
III with the invariable object of reducing the American 
colonies to a state of ''absolute despotism." It was a final and 
curt repudiation of the authority of Great Britain, and a 
mutual pledge of life, fortune, and honor to maintain the 
commonwealths from New Hampshire to Georgia as free and 
independent states. 

The Declaration of Independence is the birth certificate of 
the American nation. It would be hard to exaggerate its 

^The Declaration was immediately printed by order of Congress and sent out 
to the various states, where it was received with pubhc celebrations, speeches, 
bonfires, and banquets. A copy was engrossed on parchment and signed by most 
of the members of Congress on August 2, 1776. The clerk of Congress, in 
making up his rough records for July 4, left a blank space into which there was 
later pasted a copy of the engrossed document with the signatures appended, 
and this was then written into the corrected minutes. It therefore looked as 
though the Declaration had been adopted and signed on July 4, 1776. As a mat- 
ter of fact, some men whose names appear on it were not in Congress on that 
date. The engrossed parchment with original signatures, preserved for many 
years in the building of the Department of State at Washington, was transferred 
in 192 1 by an Executive order to the Library of Congress, and placed, with the 
original document of the Constitution of the United States, in a kind of shrine 
where visitors may read its yellowed and faded page beneath a protecting cover of 
glass. In 1824 over two hundred facsimiles of the Declaration were made, which 
are widely distributed. Several drafts in Jefferson's handwriting are also preserved. 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



8i 



influence on political thought throughout the civilized world 
or its effect on the immediate situation in America and Eng- 
land. First of all, it cleared the air. We may set side by side 
the testimony of a patriot of Delaware and an alderman of 
London. The former wrote on July 9: ^^Now we know what 
to depend on. For my own part, I have been at a great stand. 
I could hardly own the king and fight against him at the same 
time. But now heart and hand shall move together. I do not 
think there will be 5 Tories in our part of the country in 
10 days. . . . We had great numbers who would do nothing till 
we were declared a free State, who now are ready to spend 
their lives and fortunes in defence of our country." Two 
months later, William Lee wrote from London: ^^The Decla- 
ration of Independence has totally changed the nature of the 
contest. It is now on the part of Great Britain a scheme of 
conquest, which few imagine can succeed. Independence has 
totally altered the face of things here. The Tories . . . hang 
their heads and keep a profound silence on the subject. The 
Whigs do not say much, but rather seem to think the step a 
wise one on the part of America,^ and the inevitable conse- 
quence of the measures taken by the British ministry." It 
was certain that imperial unity could not exist with full liberty 
as the terms '^empire" and ^'liberty" were understood on either 
side of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. In trying to 
keep the one and gain the other the colonists exposed them- 
selves to those charges of inconsistency and vacillation which 
Thomas Paine so mercilessly pressed home in "Common 
Sense." But now all ambiguity was at an end. Protest, ex- 
postulation, and nullification were all merged in the single 
aim of vindicating the glorious and rebellious Declaration on 
the field of battle. 

The Declaration also marked the sharp separation of the 
Tories from the "patriots." Till now the former had been 

iThis is true only of the Rockingham Whigs. Fox declared that the "Ameri- 
cans had done no more than the English did against James II." The great 
majority of the Whigs, however, both the "old Whigs" of Burke and the "new 
Whigs" of Chatham, severely reprobated the American drift toward independence. 



82 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



lagging brethren, diverging widely in their judgment as to how 
much pressure should be brought to bear on the ministry in 
London, but all agreed that it must stop short of rebellion. 
They abhorred treason to the king ; but the Declaration made 
them traitors to America. Had they been few or poor, they 
might have been treated with contemptuous indifference, but 
they were many and comprised a good part of the elite of the 
land — large proprietors, merchants, lawyers, college presidents 
and graduates^ ex-officers of the crown, and practically all the 
Anglican clergy. The Tories who were not fortunate enough 
to get away from Boston on Howe's ships, or to be under the 
king's protection in the royal armies or in those seaports which 
were held by British garrisons (Newport, New York, Phila- 
delphia, Charleston, Savannah), fared very badly. They were 
tarred and feathered, ridden on fence rails, robbed of their 
property, and branded in the press as ^^parricides of their 
country." Washington, from whose pen the last phrase came, 
wondered why "persons who are preying on the vitals of their 
country should be allowed to stalk at large, whilst we know 
that they will do us every harm in their power." The desperate 
state of the patriot cause during the six months following the 
Declaration only seemed to justify the prophetic taunt of the 
Tories that the American colonies had cut their own arteries 
in severing themselves from the British Empire and would 
soon repent the repudiation of a benevolent king. Bleeding 
feet, tattered coats, and empty stomachs were poor agents of 
reconciliation or moderation. The patriots who did not desert 
under such trials were triply steeled in their determination to 
confound all traitors. 

Finally, the Declaration of Independence was important as 
a stroke in diplomacy. So long as the Americans were fighting 
to coerce Great Britain into granting concessions which would 
make them by their own confession dutiful and loyal subjects 
of King George, they could hardly expect the aid of European 
countries. France, Spain, and Holland were not interested in 
the reform of the British Empire — they wanted its destruction. 
When therefore the Congress at Philadelphia announced the 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



83 



secession of the largest and richest part of the proud empire, 
the announcement was received with joy at the courts of Europe. 
The Declaration itself, to be sure, was not enough to tempt 
France, verging as she was toward bankruptcy and revolu- 
tion, to take the lead publicly in building up a coalition of 
European rivals of Britain's imperial power. Another year and 
a decided American victory in the field were necessary to bring 
about that result. But from the moment of the Declaration 
secret aid from France in money, arms, and clothing was 
liberally supplied, with the connivance of the ministers of 
Louis XVI. The French government allowed and even en- 
couraged its officers to solicit commands in the American army, 
When it issued orders to stop ships sailing for America with 
contraband goods, it supplied supplementary instructions to 
make their escape easy. It ostentatiously forbade the use of 
French ports to American privateers while privately assuring 
the American agents that the prize courts would not interfere 
with ^Hhe enjoyment of the whole harvest of plunder upon 
British commerce." And all the while, the French foreign 
office was pledging to the British ambassador ^'the perfect neu- 
trahty and pacific intentions" of King Louis's government. 
Whether or not the American army could have held together 
without the aid of France we cannot tell, for we cannot set 
a limit to the tenacious, patient courage of George Washington. 
The judicious Lecky believed that most of the American states 
would have abandoned the struggle without this help from 
Europe, and that, although New England and Virginia might 
have kept up a local warfare for a time, ^Hhe peace party 
would have soon gained the ascendent and the colonies been 
reunited to the mother country." 

Washington's army, which had been transferred to New 
York after the British evacuated Boston, heard the Declara- 
tion read in what is now City Hall Square, on July 9, and hailed 
it with joy. The leaden equestrian statue of George III was 
thrown down to be melted into bullets, and the king's arms on 
public buildings were torn down and burned in boisterous bon- 
fires, — all in the sight of General Howe's troops on Staten 



84 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Island. In the dark days of the autumn of 1776, when the 
American hopes seemed to have faded Kke a summer's flower, 
when Washington was reluctantly withdrawing his dwindling 
army across the state of New Jersey and writing that the game 
was ''pretty well up/' when no friendly foreign power had as 
yet taken us by the hand, it is doubtful whether anything else 
could have held the ill-kept soldiers and the despairing states- 
men to their task than that pledge of their lives, their fortunes, 
and their sacred honor to the cause of independence. 

War and Peace 

More than a year passed after the signing of the Declaration 
of Independence before there was much likelihood that the 
American states would succeed in assuming that ''separate and 
equal station among the powers of the earth" to which they 
aspired. Next to their own indomitable leader, the patriot 
army had the commander of the British forces to thank that 
it was not annihilated in any one of a half dozen desperate 
situations in which it found itself in the autumn and winter 
of 1 776-1 777. Richard, Lord Howe, admiral in the British 
navy, sailed into New York harbor a week after the Declara- 
tion of Independence was adopted, bringing reenforcements 
to his brother William, who was encamped on Staten Island. 
When the forces of the Howes were joined by Sir Henry 
Clinton's troops, returning from an unsuccessful attack on 
Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor, and by some 8000 German 
mercenaries hired from the princes of Anhalt, Brunswick, and 
Hesse, there were nearly 35,000 soldiers in the British ranks — 
the largest army gathered on American soil till the Civil War. 

To oppose this formidable force Washington had nominally 
about 18,000 men, but they were poorly equipped and ill 
trained. General Israel Putnam with 8000 patriot troops forti- 
fied Brooklyn Heights and tried to hold Long Island against 
Howe ; but the British easily outflanked and defeated Putnam's 
advance lines under Generals Hull and Stirling (August 27), 
and Howe had the Americans completely at his mercy in their 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



85 



trenches at Brooklyn. All he had to do was to send a warship 
into the East River and shut off their retreat to the New York 
side. The ferry was left open, however, and Washington col- 
lected craft of all sorts along the shore and transported his 
entire army to the Manhattan side under the cover of a heavy 
fog. Howe's advance pickets arrived at the water's edge in 
time to fire a few scattering volleys at the vanishing boats. 

This amazing apathy of General Howe was of a piece with 
his conduct for the next ten months. He followed Washing- 
ton's army more like a detective shadowing a suspected crim- 
inal than like a general with a vastly superior army seeking 
his prey. When he got close enough to the patriot army to 
bring it to bay, as at Harlem Heights or White Plains, he was 
satisfied with inflicting a defeat and letting the Americans 
continue their retreat. If he captured the garrisons at Forts 
Washington and Lee, it was only after allowing the Americans 
plenty of time to abandon the strongholds if they wished to. 
When he was leisurely pursuing the dwindling army across the 
state of New Jersey, he timed his march so that his advance 
columns entered Trenton just as Washington had got his last 
boatload of troops across the Delaware to the Pennsylvania 
side. At any moment of the five months (January to May, 
1777) during which Washington's army of never more than 
4000 men lay at Morristown, New Jersey, in winter quarters, 
a detachment from Howe's army at New York or Cornwallis's 
at New Brunswick might have annihilated the patriots and 
ended the war. Washington himself wrote in March: ^^If the 
enemy do not move, it will be a miracle. Nothing but ignorance 
of our numbers and situation can protect us." But Howe was 
ignorant of neither, and yet he did not move. Desertions from 
Washington's army were constant. The New Jersey farmers 
who defended their cattle, chickens, and vegetables against the 
patriot scouts, in order that they might sell them at high prices 
in hard gold to the British in New York, could give their 
customers all the information they wished. 

The plain fact is that the commander of King George's 
forces in America did not wish to conquer the Americans by 



86 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the sword. He was a Whig, although the king's cousin, and he 
had promised his constituents at Nottingham that he would not 
fight to subdue the people whom Burke and Chatham lauded. 
He was the brother of the valiant George Howe, who had fallen 
in Abercrombie's ill-fated attack on Ticonderoga (1758) and 
whose monument in Westminster Abbey had been built by the 
grateful generosity of the colony of Massachusetts. He was 
himself a veteran of the French wars in America, having com- 
manded a regiment at Louisburg (1758) and climbed the steep 
path of the Anse de Foulon in the vanguard of Wolfe's band 
of volunteers for the surprise of the pickets at Quebec. He 
and his brother Lord Richard bore the commission from the 
king to pardon the Americans individually and collectively on 
their return to allegiance to the crown. ^ This olive branch 
Howe carried in his right hand, the sword in his left. He be- 
lieved that the great majority of Americans were really loyal 
to the king, but had been led astray by demagogues and fire- 
brands. He thought, not without reason, that the patriot army 
would disintegrate, composed as it was of shifting levies of 
militia, while the people of New Jersey and the other central 
states flocked in increasing numbers to the Tory camp. Some 
3000 had accepted the royal proclamation of pardon in De- 
cember, 1776, and were carrying the certificates of loyalty 
snugly in their coat pockets to frighten off any British or 
Hessian raiders. 

Whether Howe's conduct is to be explained by his own 
amiable indolence or by the complication of British politics, 
it was of utmost service to the patriot cause. He spared Wash- 
ington's army until the sentiment of independence had taken 
deep root in America; until the new state governments were 

1 After the battle of Long Island, Lord Richard sent General Sullivan to Con- 
gress to ask for a conference. Franklin, Adams, and Rutledge went to his head- 
quarters on Staten Island and were regaled on his excellent mutton and claret, 
but came to no terms. Howe expressed his regret that he had not arrived in 
America before July 4. When he spoke of his reluctance to conquer the Ameri- 
cans, Franklin replied, "We will do our utmost to save your lordship that 
embarrassment." 




The Revolutionary War in the Central Atlantic States, 

1776-1778 



88 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



established ; until Congress was converted to the raising of a 
standing army and so confirmed in its confidence in the great 
commander as to give him almost dictatorial power in the 
appointment of officers and the management of the war ; until 
our persistent solicitations resulted in secret gifts of clothing, 
guns, and money from France. No wonder that the patriot 
officers drank healths to General Howe ! And no wonder that 
the American Tories (except those who profited by the favors 
of his entourage) condemned him as the marplot who was 
spreading rebellion in the delusion that he was encouraging rec- 
onciliation.^ The American army suffered many an anxious 
hour and many a humiliating defeat after the amiable Howe 
departed, but these defeats did not mean the collapse of the 
American cause. Even among the snows of Valley Forge the 
presence of Lafayette, Steuben, and Pulaski was a visible proof 
that the cause of the American patriots was becoming the cause 
of Europe. The moment for the British government to have 
crushed the American Revolution was when the army of crude 
militia levies was barely holding together in its long season of 
retreats, when the distracted Congress had fled from its hall in 
Philadelphia, and when the new states were still dallying with 
^'provisional " governments, only half convinced that the Decla- 
ration of Independence was wholly wise.^ That moment General 
Howe let pass, and it never came again. 

1 Howe was invested with the order of the Knights of the Bath in March, 1777, 
for his sterile victory on Long Island the year before. Judge Jones, the Tory 
historian of New York, with bitter sarcasm, called the decoration the reward for 
evacuating Boston, for lying indolent upon Staten Island for near two months, 
for suffering the whole rebel army to escape from him on Long Island and again 
at White Plains," etc. That Howe had some support in Parhament is beyond 
doubt. Arthur Johnson of Canada, in his "Myths and Mythmakers of the 
American Revolution," attributes the success of the Americans to the encourage- 
ment which they received from the Enghsh Whigs. A few days before the fall 
of Lord North (March, 1782) a Tory member of the Commons, named Onslow, 
said in defense of the prime minister, "Why have we failed so miserably in this 
war against America, if not from the support and countenance given to rebellion 
in this very house ! " 

2 The state governments formed by Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vir- 
ginia before the Declaration was adopted were only temporary. New Jersey, 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



89 



Only a single positive achievement broke the monotonous 
course of defeats and retreats for the patriot army in the year 
that followed the Declaration of Independence. After having 
escaped from Howe on Long Island, Washington had been 
forced to evacuate New York, which remained in the hands of 
the British during the entire war. Four thousand prisoners of 
war went with the city, and other thousands were captured 
when the forts on the Hudson were forced to capitulate. Vainly 
summoning the insubordinate Charles Lee from the Highlands 
of the Hudson to reenforce his shrinking army, Washington 
fell back across the state of New Jersey to a position behind the 
Delaware, while Howe spread out his forces in a line of posts 
reaching from Perth Amboy through Trenton and Bordentown. 
Thousands of the inhabitants of New Jersey accepted the 
certificates of loyalty eagerly distributed by the Howes. Con- 
gress fled to Baltimore, and the people of Philadelphia awaited 
with indifference the establishment of a British garrison. Then 
Washington turned like a wounded animal at bay. While he 
still had the remnants of an army, and before the river froze 
solid to give the British access to the capital city," he crossed 
to the Jersey side late on Christmas night and fell upon the 
Hessians at Trenton in the midst of their holiday revels. A com- 
plete victory, a thousand prisoners, and the consternation of the 
British line through New Jersey were the rewards of his ex- 
ploit. Cornwallis, just about to embark for England, hastened 
to repair the disaster. But Washington outwitted and eluded 
him, defeated three British regiments at Princeton, and sent the 
bewildered Cornwallis back in panic to protect his stores at 
New Brunswick. In a ten days' campaign Washington had re- 
covered the state of New Jersey. He led his soldiers into their 
precarious winter quarters at Morristown with a glorious 

on the very day of the vote in Congress on independence, published a constitu- 
tion which was to be "provisional in case of reconciliation with Great Britain." 
It was not till 1777 that state governments were established, with severe test 
laws compeHing their citizens to swear that the war with Great Britain was just 
and necessary and to transfer their allegiance from King George to the new 
state authorities. 



90 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



memory to sustain them in the midst of privation and hunger. 
It was the most critical action of the war, for it meant Hfe or 
death to the American cause. It was also the one military- 
achievement of Washington's that ranks him with the great 
masters of strategy. It won the praise of the greatest soldier 
of the age, Frederick of Prussia, and it remained in the mind of 
Lord Cornwallis to the end of the war. Five years later, when he 
surrendered at Yorktown, Cornwallis gracefully complimented 
Washington on his ^^unsurpassed" performance in New Jersey. 

When Washington emerged from his quarters at Morristown 
in May, 1777, with ranks swollen to some 11,000 by the spring 
levies, the plan was already taking shape in the British councils 
which was to decide the issue of the war. It was an involved 
plan, complicated by a lively exchange of letters and orders 
between the generals in America and the ministry in London; 
and it is still the subject of a voluminous literature of incrimi- 
nation and justification. The upshot of it was that General 
John Burgoyne with an army of 8000 men should come down 
from Canada via Lake Champlain and the upper Hudson valley, 
while St. Leger, operating from Lake Ontario via Fort Stanwix 
(Rome) and the Mohawk, should join him at Albany, and 
General Howe should proceed from New York up the Hudson 
to receive these supporting armies. The British forces thus 
concentrated, and in possession of the entire Hudson-Champlain 
line, could turn east or south to crush the rebellion. As the 
British already had control of the Hudson up to the Highlands, 
it is difficult to see how Washington could have done more than 
to follow Howe with such harassing rear attacks as he dared to 
hazard. What was his surprise to learn, just as the messages 
reached him that Burgoyne was well started on his march, that 
Howe's great fleet was sighted off the lower New Jersey coast, 
bearing to the south. Howe had left only 6000 men behind in 
New York under Sir Henry Clinton. 

What Howe's motive was in thus "deserting" Burgoyne at 
the critical moment we do not know. Only worse confusion 
comes of reading the reports of the investigation of the con- 
duct of both the generals at the bar of Parliament in 1779 — 



I 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



91 



an investigation suddenly stopped for political reasons. But 
whether it was lack of definite instructions from England, or 
the belief that Burgoyne's army was able to take care of itself, 
or an exaggerated idea of the importance of taking the rebel 
capital" of Philadelphia, or the desire to end the war in the 
Middle States before the Tory general, Burgoyne, should have 
time to gather laurels, or a mixture of all these motives, that 
determined Howe to go south instead of north, the result of his 
move was the disruption of the British Empire in America. 
Washington could not prevent Howe from occupying and hold- 
ing Philadelphia, in spite of his brilliant resistance at Brandy- 
wine Creek (September 11) and his attack on German town 
(October 4). But Howe's success was dearly paid for. Three 
days after the battle of Germantown Burgoyne abandoned his 
hope of reaching Albany. In the three months since he had left 
Ticonderoga with his heavily equipped regulars and his elabo- 
rate baggage trains he had covered only seventy-five miles of the 
rough, wooded country of upper New York. The farmers from 
all over New England had shouldered their flintlock muskets and 
hastened to join the forces gathering on his flank. By the first 
of September there were 10,000 troops with Schuyler, Gates, 
and Arnold, and in another month the numbers had almost 
doubled. Wherever the king's forces point," wrote Burgoyne 
in despair, militia to the number of 3000 or 4000 assemble in 
a few hours." He tried to beat them off by brave attacks be- 
fore Saratoga and Stillwater, but they were too many for him. 
On October 7 he was so roughly handled by Arnold and Morgan 
at the battle of Freeman's Farm that he abandoned his forward 
march. Ten days later, despairing of help from either Carleton 
on the north or Clinton on the south, he surrendered to General 
Gates the 5000 men that were left of his army. 

The loss of an army, ''surrendered to poltroons and cowards 
incapable of fighting," as Burgoyne's British critics persisted 
in calling the American militia, was the least of the calamities 
that Saratoga spelled for the British cause. Burgoyne sur- 
rendered in October. In November, Congress adopted the 
Articles of Confederation — a constitution binding the states 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



together in ^^a perpetual union." In December the news of the 
surrender reached France and induced the court to make a for- 
mal treaty of alliance with the United States. It was signed 
on February 6, 1778. In a desperate effort to prevent the con- 
flict in America from widening into a European coalition, Lord 
North had introduced into Parliament a Conciliatory Act, re- 
pealing the tea tax of 1767 and the Intolerable Acts of 1774 
and authorizing a commission to sail for America to negotiate 
the return of the revolting colonies to the empire. The terms 
to be offered removed every abuse against which the Americans 
had protested since the Grenville legislation. 

This simultaneous movement of France and Great Britain 
toward a closer union with the rebel states across the ocean 
was the most significant diplomatic event of the Revolution. It 
put America in a favored position which her astute minister at 
Paris, Benjamin Franklin, was not slow to improve. He could 
speak with mock anxiety of the possibility that America might 
be obliged to consider England's offer unless more help were 
forthcoming from Europe, and could work on Vergennes's fears 
that the success of the English commission would mean the 
triumph of the Whigs, in whose eyes France and not America 
was the great enemy, ^^The power that recognizes American 
independence will gather all the fruits of this war," wrote Ver- 
gennes. Great Britain was willing to concede everything but 
independence. France outbid her, offering the aid necessary 
to the establishment of complete independence and granting, 
besides recognition, a favorable treaty of commerce.^ 

America eagerly welcomed the alliance with France in spite 
of Tory tales to the effect that the country would be overrun 
with Roman priests and that rosaries, relics, racks, and thumb- 
screws, with bales of "papistical tracts," were coming in the 

iQn the basis of material lately discovered in the Paris archives Professor 
Van Tyne has shown that French agents in London warned their government 
that the American states were ready, in return for the acknowledgment of their 
independence, to join with England in an attack on the French West Indies. It 
was probably to frustrate such a move, he believes, that the French government 
agreed to the treaty of alliance with the United States in February, 1778. 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



93 



holds of King Louis's ships. What did come was powder, lead, 
and gold. All told, between 1778 and 1781 France furnished us 
all our naval strength, half our land forces, and equipment and 
stores of incalculable value. Her intervention in our behalf 
cost her over 1,000,000,000 francs. In return we promised to 
make no terms with Great Britain short of the recognition of 
our independence and to continue the war against the British 
Empire until our ally should be ready to make peace. It was the 
only treaty of alliance that the United States ever made, and, 
as the sequel will show, it cost us much embarrassment until 
we were relieved of it by Napoleon Bonaparte in 180 1. A ro- 
mantic interest attaches to the reception by Congress, on 
August 6, 1778, of the first accredited foreign minister to the 
United States, M. Gerard^ bearing a letter from Louis XVI to 
his ^Very dear great friends and allies." It was the formal 
entrance of America into the family of nations. 

The humiliation at Saratoga, the rejection of the Conciliatory 
Acts, and the conclusion of the French alliance brought about 
a decided change in the conduct of the war. England cast 
aside the olive branch and transferred the sword from her left 
hand to her right. Revolt against her authority was one thing, 
but a treaty of alliance with her old enemy France was insult 
added to injury and obstinacy. The punishment should be 
swift and unsparing. Clinton and Cornwallis never had more 
than a third of the splendid army which the Howes brought to 
New York in the summer of 1776; but they now used their 
troops as the Howes never did. They sent out detachments in 
every direction to terrorize the country by savage raids. The 
theater of the war was changed too. Until now (except for 
Clinton's futile expedition against Charleston in 1776) all the 
fighting had been in the Northern states, but after 1778 it was 
all south of the Potomac. The British held Newport until late 
in 1 779 and New York until the close of the war, while Washing- 
ton lay with his army for three years strongly intrenched in the 
Highlands of the Hudson. He never met Clinton in battle, 
and in fact fought no important engagement at all between 
Monmouth (June, 1778) and Yorktown (October, 1781). 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



In transferring the seat of the war to the South the British 
ministers and generals were making a fresh start. They would 
crush the rebellion by detaching the great lower states one by 
one from the Union, from Georgia up to Virginia. Savannah 
was taken December 29, 1778, with all its ammunition, stores, 
and shipping. The patriot officials were driven from the state of 
Georgia along with the patriot militia. The old colonial govern- 
ment was reestablished and Georgia was formally declared by 
Parliament to be out of the rebellion. In May, 1780, the 
British brought a fleet and army down from New York and 
reduced Charleston, the richest seaport of the South. With 
the town of Charleston, General Benjamin Lincoln surrendered 
2500 colonial troops, practically the whole American army 
south of the Potomac. Henceforth Cornwallis could move where 
he would. He began his march through the interior of the 
Carolinas, expecting the tens of thousands of Loyalists in those 
states to flock to his banners, as the patriots of New York and 
New England had flocked to the banners of Schuyler, Gates, 
and Arnold at Saratoga. 

But Cornwallis discovered what all the British commanders 
learned, that while it was easy to hold the seaport towns with 
the support of the British fleet, the inland and upland regions 
escaped his control. It was not Tories but patriot farmers, 
hunters, and wood-rangers from both sides of the Appalachian 
Mountains who swarmed around Colonel Ferguson at King's 
Mountain (October 7, 1780) and nearly exterminated his de- 
tachment of Loyalist militia. The ''affair" at King's Moun- 
tain struck terror into the army of Cornwallis: ''There is 
scarcely an inhabitant between the Santee and the Pedee who 
is not in arms against us," he wrote. He tarried at Wilmington 
to repair the morale of his troops, while fresh thousands joined 
the guerrilla leaders of the patriots. After a year's hard cam- 
paigning by detachments between the yellow rivers which slant 
lazily across the Carolinas, Cornwallis found himself in the 
summer of 1781 just where he had been in the summer of 1780 ; 
namely, in control of the seaboard. Even the patriot governor 
and legislature of Georgia had been restored. 



96 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Not that the American cause was in a flourishing state. The 
same spring which was to open the last year of actual warfare 
(1781) marked in some respects the epoch of deepest dejection 
and gloom for the patriots. The brilliant Arnold, his vanity 
wounded by the "ingratitude" of Congress and flattered by the 
solicitations of Tory friends, had attempted to deliver over the 
stronghold of West Point (and therewith the Hudson and 
Washington's army) to General Clinton. Continental currency 
was so worthless that unless some gold could be secured from 
France, Congress would cease to be able to purchase any 
supplies or even hire transportation for those which it com- 
mandeered. The calls for enlistments in the continental army 
went unheeded, and the regiments already enlisted began to 
show signs of mutiny for lack of food and pay. The pathetic and 
the humorous are strangely blended in the fortunes of the army 
in those closing months of the war : Washington riding to Hart- 
ford to meet Rochambeau for a ceremonious welcome to the 
French troops in the summer of 1780 without money enough 
to pay the tavern bills of his suite; Morgan capitalizing the 
cowardice of the raw militia at Cowpens (January 17, 1781) 
by ordering them to fire two volleys and run to the rear — warn- 
ing the regulars not to disturb them when they should see them 
flying past; Greene's troops at Eutaw Springs (August, 1781) 
literally in rags, and sometimes even in Adam's garb of foliage, 
their distracted commanders writing, "Turn what way you 
will . . . ruin is in every form and misery in every shape.'* 

Yet in spite of suffering and poverty, the situation was not 
so desperate as in 1776. Cornwallis might detach the states 
south of Virginia, but the North was safe. The most England 
could hope for was to limit independence to New England 
and the Middle States. Furthermore, the maritime powers of 
Europe were growing more and more determined that England 
should not win the war. Spain had joined France in 1779, and 
the next year Holland came into the coalition against "the 
tyrant of the seas"; while Russia, Denmark, and Sweden 
formed the league of "armed neutrality" to enforce the doc- 
trine that "free ships make free goods." In India, in the 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



97 



Mediterranean, in the West Indies, and on the high seas Eng- 
lish soldiers and sailors were contending against the powers 
of Europe. The Whigs in Parliament were clamoring to have 
the war in America ended, in order that Great Britain might 
concentrate her attack on her ancient enemies, France and 
Spain. Finally, the French, whose military and naval aid had 
thus far been unfruitful,^ might at any moment furnish just 
the help necessary to turn the scale and win the war. 

In January, 1781, Congress, at Washington's request, sent 
Colonel John Laurens as special envoy to France to represent 
our deplorable situation and urge immediate aid. The appeal 
was not in vain. King Louis sent over an army of 7000 men 
with Admiral De Grasse, and 2,000,000 francs in gold. General 
Rochambeau, who had been lying inactive at Newport for a 
year, joined Washington at White Plains (July 6), and De 
Grasse sent word from the West Indies that he could spare his 
ships for a while to cooperate with the troops on the coast. It 
was too good an offer to miss. At first Washington wanted to 
attack New York, but a better opening presented itself. Corn- 
wallis, whose plans grew more grandiose as his means dwindled, 
had conceived the idea of reducing the rich and populous state 
of Virginia by a series of raids like those conducted in the 
Carolinas. He boasted that he would drive out ^'that boy" 
Lafayette, who was in command of a small army in the state. 
But Lafayette outmaneuvered him in Virginia as Greene had 
done in the Carolinas, and Cornwallis returned as usual to 
the coast, establishing himself in the peninsula between the 
York and the James Rivers, at Yorktown. The strategy was 
excellent so long as he had the support of the British fleet, as at 

^The French fleet, on whose cooperation any hope of driving the British from 
the coast towns depended, was ordered to operate in the West Indies and give 
only its spare time to the American coast. The result was that there could be no 
effective support of the land forces. D'Estaing happened always to arrive just 
too late or to depart just too early to prevent the embarkation of Clinton's 
troops or to intercept British transports bearing provisions and reenforcements. 
The Virginia assembly petitioned in vain for French ships to guard the entrance 
to Chesapeake Bay, for example, at the time of Arnold's raid on the state 
(April, 1 781). 



98 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Savannah and Charleston; but he had moved so far up the 
coast that the only naval help that could reach him quickly 
would have to come from Clinton at New York. Washington's 
clear eye saw the situation at a glance. He sent a swift ship to 
the West Indies to beg De Grasse to hasten to the capes of 
Chesapeake Bay, while he and Rochambeau, after a feint on 
New York to keep Clinton anxious, marched rapidly from the 
Hudson to the head of Chesapeake Bay and there embarked 
for the Yorktown peninsula. Du Barras brought the siege 
artillery from Newport in another French fleet. All the difficult 
maneuvers were executed with precision and success. When 
the British admiral Graves arrived from New York, he found 
the French in possession of the entrance to Chesapeake Bay 
and his own fleet too weak to dislodge them. Cornwallis was 
in the trap. The superior forces of Americans and French 
drew their siege lines closer and closer about his position, and 
on October 19, 1 781, he surrendered his army of 7000 men. 

Cornwallis's capitulation at Yorktown, like Burgoyne's at 
Saratoga, was humiHating, but not irretrievable. It need not 
have ended the war. In fact, neither the American commander 
nor the British monarch thought that it would. Washington 
began to lay his plans for an attack on New York or Charleston 
when the French fleet should return from the Indies for its next 
summer vacation on the American coast; and George III, in 
his speech from the throne on the opening of Parliament 
(November 27, 1781), talked confidently of continuing the 
struggle. Still the W^hig motion to conclude peace with 
America and turn the whole power of Britain against the 
European coalition was lost only by the rather close vote of 
179 to 220. A few weeks later, when the French had captured 
the island of St. Eustatius in the West Indies and the Spaniards 
and French had taken Minorca in the Mediterranean, the same 
motion was defeated by only a single voice in Parhament. On 
March 20, 1782, Lord North, after a valiant but reluctant 
struggle of twelve years to maintain the high Tory policy of 
George III, resigned the British government into the hands of 
the Marquis of Rockingham. CHnton was immediately recalled 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



99 



from New York, and his place taken by Sir Guy Carleton, a 
friend of conciliation like the Howes. Emissaries were sent 
to both Vergennes and Franklin in Paris to sound them on 
terms of peace. 

The British ministry tried hard — especially after the death 
of Rockingham, in July, 1782, brought to the premiership Lord 
Shelburne of the imperial school of Chatham — to arrange a 
peace without granting American independence. They were 
willing to give France concessions in India to detach her from 
the American alliance, and to grant the Americans everything 
that they had asked of Parliament since 1763. But it was in 
vain. Neither Vergennes nor Franklin, neither the American 
Congress nor any of the states, would agree to the terms. Even 
Holland, which had recognized us as a nation in April, 1782, 
and received our envoy John Adams as minister at The Hague, 
would not make a separate peace with England except on the 
basis of American independence. When the British govern- 
ment had finally conceded this main point, however, the 
American commissioners (Franklin, Adams, and Jay) were 
less scrupulous about carrying out to the letter another article 
of our treaty of 1778 with France. We had promised not to 
make peace until our ally should be ready, and the American 
Congress instructed our commissioners to respect this promise. 
But when it was evident that France was delaying the peace in 
order to get advantages for her ally Spain which did not con- 
cern us (Gibraltar and Florida), and which were entirely 
foreign to the avowed object of the treaty of 1778, our com- 
missioners matched subtlety against subtlety in proceeding 
alone with the negotiations with Great Britain. It took a good 
deal of apologetic flattery from Franklin's suave pen to pla- 
cate Vergennes; but the Americans had their way, and on 
November 30, 1782, the preliminaries of peace were signed 
at Paris.^ 

^The American commissioners have received much censure for breaking the 
letter of the treaty after all the aid that we had received from France; and it 
took considerable persuasion on the part of John Jay (besides the breaking of the 
famous clay pipe) to win Franklin over to the policy of a separate negotiation. 



100 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The wildest patriot enthusiast could not claim that we had 
"beaten" Great Britain. We had checked her raids in the 
interior of the states and contributed valuable strategic advice 
and brave troops to the French forces which had compelled 
Cornwallis to surrender at Yorktown. The indispensable naval 
contingent at Yorktown was entirely French, and a majority 
of the besieging troops under Washington's supreme command 
were also French. Yet the terms of peace which we obtained 
could not have been more favorable if we had humbled the 
British Empire to the dust. In addition to our independence, 
we secured the Mississippi as our western boundary,^ the 
right to share in the fisheries of Newfoundland, and immunity 
from further responsibility toward the thousands of Loyalists 
whose property had been confiscated than a recommendation 
by Congress that the states should put no obstacle in the way 
of the recovery of such property through their courts. 

The disproportionate success of our diplomacy and our arms 
was due to several causes : the astuteness and firmness of our 
commissioners at Paris, the bad situation of the British fleet 
in the West Indies before the news of the victory of Rodney 

But it must also be said that the French were attempting to break the treaty 
in spirit by prolonging the war, to America's detriment, after the object of the 
treaty, the independence of America, was secured. Spain was not our ally but 
France's. We were not bound to jeopardize our fortunes for the sake of Spain's 
ambitions, and we had no part in the promises made by France to Spain. 

^Some historians have attributed England's acceptance of the Mississippi 
rather than the Alleghenies as our western boundary to George Rogers Clark's 
wonderful conquest of the Northwest in 17 78-1 7 79. Certainly that feat deserved 
the winning of an empire. But there is little evidence that it affected the negotia- 
tions at Paris, nor does Clark's name even appear among the documents. 
The simple fact seems to be that England, having given up the colonies, had 
little interest in the wilderness behind them. The story of Clark's deeds — his 
embassy to Governor Patrick Henry to secure aid for the recovery of Virginia's 
chartered domain from the British and the removal of the Indian danger from 
the frontier settlements ; his expedition down the Ohio and his surprise of the 
forts on the Mississippi (Kaskaskia and Cahokia) with only a handful of men ; 
his masterful dominion over the Indians and the half-breeds ; and finally his 
march of over two hundred and thirty miles in the dead of winter (February, 
1779) across the southern end of Illinois and through the icy waters, neck deep, 
of the "drowned lands" of the Wabash valley, to surprise the British commander 
at Vincennes — is the most dramatic chapter of our Revolutionary history. 




The United States by the Treaty of 1783 



102 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



over De Grasse in the spring of 1782 restored confidence in 
London, and the anxiety of the new Whig ministry to keep 
in power by a triumph over the European coaHtion against 
Great Britain. The Whigs indulged America to an extent that 
made England seem rather our ally against France than the 
common enemy of France and us. ''The Enghsh do not make 
the peace, they buy it," cried Vergennes in amazement. A free 
America the French wished to see as one of the fragments of 
a dismembered Britain; a powerful America was no part of 
their plan. Vergennes tried to confine the new United States 
to a narrow strip of land between the AUeghenies and the sea 
(see map, p. loi). He tried to balance concessions for his 
ally Spain against America's demands for fishing-rights off 
Newfoundland. He urged the British government to insist on 
indemnification for the Tories. But it was all in vain. The 
stars in their courses fought for America; and the French 
were compelled to be even a greater help to us in the victory 
of peace than in the stress of war. Vergennes might have antic- 
ipated George Canning by forty years, and with greater truth 
have exclaimed (but more in regret than in exultation), ''I called 
the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old." 

On April 19, 1783, the eighth anniversary of the battle of 
Lexington, Washington read to his troops the proclamation 
of Congress ordering the cessation of hostilities; and the "em- 
battled farmers" returned to their homes, often begging their 
bread on the way, to hang their rude weapons over the kitchen 
mantle as souvenirs for their prosperous grandchildren to show 
with pride and gratitude. The definitive treaty of peace was 
signed September 3, 1783, and a few weeks later Carleton 
sailed down the harbor of New York with the garrison which 
had occupied the city for seven years. Washington took an 
affectionate farewell of his officers at Fraunces' Tavern and 
embarked at the Battery for the Jersey shore. He stopped 
at Annapolis, Maryland, where about a score of the members 
of Congress were assembled. In a simple speech he laid down 
the command which he had borne with such skill and patience 
through eight years of trial; then he returned to his beloved 



THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 



acres at Mount Vernon. ^^I have retired from all public em- 
ployments/' he wrote to his dear friend Lafayette^ ^'and shall 
tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. . . . 
I shall move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with 
my fathers." 

So the second of the two unequal periods of our colonial 
history came to an end. From 1607 to 1763 we were slowly 
builded into the great British empire. In the score of years that 
followed ( 1 763-1 783) we threw off our allegiance to this empire, 
appealing from an England ill administered and inquisitorial to 
the ideals of the commonwealth heralded by Milton, Sidney, and 
Locke. This short period of our revolt against England has 
been celebrated as the birth of the American nation. But it is 
evident that the long century and a half of incubation under 
English rule must have affected our national character far more 
deeply than the comparatively brief hour of revolution. Even 
to this day our law, in the absence of any positive statute, is 
the common law of England; our government, local and 
general, our judicial procedure and administration, even our 
religious, philosophical, educational, and literary habits and 
models are still, in spite of influences exerted by an enormous 
immigration from the continent of Europe, predominantly Eng- 
lish. Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights are the basis of Ameri- 
can as well as of English liberties. Shakespeare, Newton, and 
Chatham are in a far more intimate way ours than are Goethe, 
Mirabeau, or Garibaldi. The Revolution was at bottom a civil 
struggle between two political ideals that had torn the Eng- 
lish race since the days of Queen Elizabeth — prerogative 
against democracy, or the inherited right of a family, a caste, 
against the inherent right of the man and citizen. The success 
of the American cause was the vindication (as salutary for 
England as for us) of the more liberal ideal. It was the an- 
nouncement, in the words of John Adams, ^'that a more equal 
liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must 
be established in America." Our national history has been 
true to our national ideal and a blessing to the world so far, 
and only so far, as it has vindicated this prophecy. 



CHAPTER III 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 

That which man changeth not for the better, time changeth for the worse, 
— Lord Bacon 

The Confederation 

The Unite'd States of America, whose entrance into the 
family of nations was formally recognized by the treaty of 
1783, contained a population of about three and a quarter 
millions, divided almost equally by Mason and Dixon's line.^ 
Although the Mississippi was the western boundary of the 
country, all but a very small and venturesome fraction of 
the American people lived in the commercial towns along the 
Atlantic coast or on farm lands and plantations accessible 
by the rivers which cut the shore line at frequent intervals from 
the Penobscot to the Savannah. Behind the Appalachian ridge 
the forests of hickory, oak, and sycamore, which shaded the 
rich soil of the eastern Mississippi basin, were only just waking 
to other sounds than the bellowing of the buffalo bull and the 
scream of the wild turkey — to the ring of the frontiersman's 
ax on the edge of the clearing and the crack of his rifle bring- 
ing down the buck at the salt lick or the stealthy Indian 
at his cabin door. A few thousand men had followed Boone, 
Sevier, Robertson, and Harrod across the mountains into the 
wilderness, where clusters of huts marked the sites, but gave 
little promise of the growth, of the great cities of the West — 

iThe first census of the United States, taken in 1790, shows some interest- 
ing figures. Virginia leads the Hst of states, with a population (747,610) almost 
double that of her nearest rival, Pennsylvania (434,373). Then follow North 
Carolina (!) with 397,751, Massachusetts with 378,789, New York with 340,120, 
Maryland with 319,728, and South Carolina with 240,073. These first seven 
states of 1790 rank in the census of 1920 respectively: 20, 2, 14, 6, i, 28, 26. 

104 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 105 



Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Nashville. Be- 
yond the Mississippi Spain's title began, but the land was as 
strange as the fairy kingdoms in her tales. ^^Now and then," 
says McMaster, ^'some weather-beaten trapper came from it 
to the frontiers of the states with stories of great plains level 
as a floor, where the grass grew higher than the waist, where 
the flowers were more beautiful than the best-kept garden, 
where trees were never seen, and where the Indians still looked 
on the white man as a god." Florida too was Spanish, with 
the whole shore of the Gulf of Mexico. Great Britain arbi- 
trarily held the important fur posts on the southern shores of 
the Great Lakes as pledges for the debts which American 
customers owed to her merchants. The new United States, 
then, was practically a strip seldom more than two hundred 
miles wide along the Atlantic border from Maine to Georgia. 
A generation was to pass, filled with struggles with England, 
France, and Spain for the security of our natural borders" 
and the freedom of our trade, before Americans could turn with 
absorbing seriousness to the extension of their population, their 
capital, and their government into the great domain which 
they had acquired with their independence. 

An overwhelming majority of the people were cultivators 
of the soil. They had the manners, morals, and social outlook 
of the farmer. Their needs were simple and self-supplied, 
their horizon narrow, their virtues homely, and their character 
robust. The refinements of life — art, letters, music, learn- 
ing — were rare, as they are in every community whose surplus 
of leisure and wealth is small. Benjamin Franklin, to be sure, 
wrote at the founding of the American Philosophical Society 
in 1743, ^^The first drudgery of settling the new colonies is 
pretty well over, and there are many in every colony in cir- 
cumstances which set them at ease to cultivate the finer arts 
and improve the common stock of knowledge." But these are 
the optimistic words of an exceptional scholar in exceptional 
surroundings of his own creation. The Revolutionary War 
stimulated industry, making imperative the casting of cannon, 
the manufacture of powder, the weaving of cloth for blankets, 



io6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



uniforms, and sails, the construction of wagons and gun- 
carriages ; but all this was forced and premature. Laborers were 
as yet too few and capital was too scanty (even when encour- 
aged by bounties from the states) to exploit the wealth of raw 
material in field, mine, and forest on which our later prosperity 
was based. Consequently, there were no great and teeming 
industrial centers to draw our people apart to the poles of 
luxury and want. If wealth was modest it was also fairly 
evenly distributed. Our foreign visitors in the later years of 
the eighteenth century testify almost unanimously to the gen- 
eral diffusion of a modest well-being through the states. 

Nor should the destitution of Washington's army at Valley 
Forge or the wailings of a poverty-stricken Congress mislead 
us as to the degree of that well-being. A rich country may 
refuse to support its government, as France did on the eve of 
its great revolution ; and, conversely, a government may revel 
in wealth squeezed from its millions of poor subjects, as in a 
Turkey or a Persia. There never was a doubt in Washington's 
mind of the ability of the states to support an army many 
times the size of the one which he commanded. He complained 
over and over again of the lack of public spirit, of the jealousy 
of each state and each section of the country for its own safety 
and prosperity, of the greed of the farmers who sold their 
abundant crops to the British invader while the patriot army 
starved, of the absorption of the merchants in their unwonted 
profits from privateering, of the speculators who were ^'preying 
on the vitals of this great country." After the first few months 
of the war New England was virtually free from British moles- 
tation, as were the Middle States after 1778. The Carolinas were 
not seriously disturbed until the end of 1779, nor was Virginia 
until the beginning of 1781. This desultory character of the 
British attack gave ample chance for most of the sections of 
our seaboard to enjoy a flourishing commerce with the ports 
of Europe, to which Congress opened our harbors on the out- 
break of hostilities. To be sure, British cruisers were lurking 
off the New England coast and Chesapeake Bay, but the 
Yankee skippers ran the ^'blockade" with daring and success. 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 107 



Moreover, French and British gold was brought to America 
in such quantities as to swell the currency beyond anything 
known in the colonial period ; and, with the new commerce, this 
created the beginnings of that merchant power in the North 
and planter aristocracy in the South whose influence in the 
new government was to be felt presently. 

If we ask why the moderate but sufficient resources of our 
country were not put at the disposal of the general government 
during the war and the years immediately following, the answer 
is that the general government had neither the authority nor 
the respect to command those resources. The Continental Con- 
gress was not a sovereign body, but only a group of delegates 
sent from the colony-states as a central committee of safety, 
a kind of steering committee" for the war. It did not enact 
laws, but only made recommendations which the states might 
enact into laws. It suggested military plans and requested con- 
tributions from the states for the support of the army and the 
maintenance of diplomatic agents. It even acted on the in- 
struction of the colonies in introducing the Declaration of 
Independence. The war was virtually over before Congress 
had any legal standing or defined powers; that is, before it 
was formally made a ^^government" by the thirteen states 
(March i, 1781). 

Union is now an ideal as precious to us as its companion 
ideals in our political trinity — Liberty and Democracy. Con- 
sequently, it is a tempting theory to see in the Continental Con- 
gress what Professor Burgess has called ^Hhe first organization 
of the American state," and to attribute to it authority over the 
state governments, as Webster and Lincoln did. But the men 
of the Revolutionary era did not regard Congress in this light. 
When allegiance to Great Britain was severed, even though 
that action was proclaimed by Congress and not by the several 
states, it was nevertheless to the states and not to Congress 
that the new allegiance was thought to be due. James Madison, 
in 1782, declared that it was ^^extravagant" to maintain that 
^Hhe rights of the British crown devolved on the Continental 
Congress." The states exercised various acts of sovereignty 



io8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

during the war and for some time after. They coined money 
and issued bills of credit ; they built navies and raised armies ; 
they sought to negotiate loans with foreign powers ; they con- 
sulted Congress as a kind of advisory board only and rejected 
its recommendations without any thought of rebellion." When 
New Hampshire refused to let her militia serve outside her 
borders, when Connecticut designated herself ^^a free and in- 
dependent state," when Virginia ratified the treaty of 1778 
with France and discussed with Spain the desirability of their 
providing for a joint protection of their trade by the establish- 
ment of a fort on the Virginia border, when South Carolina 
explicitly conferred on her government the right to make war 
and negotiate treaties, when all the states levied tariffs, laid em- 
bargoes, paid or refused to pay their assessments by Congress 
at will, it is evident that there was no national state" but only 
thirteen states with a common diplomatic body" at Philadel- 
phia, and that Union meant for the time being only a prudent 
intercolonial cooperation."^ 

But if there was no national state during the Revolutionary 
period, there was nevertheless an American nationality. The 
political machinery lagged behind the conscious unity of pur- 
pose. A common language and law, a common republican form 
of government, a common grievance — all tended toward a 
formal union. The protest against the Stamp Act, the sympathy 
for Massachusetts under the Intolerable Acts, the petitions and 
apologies sent to the king and Parliament, the Declaration 
of Independence, were all the work of united, not separate, 
colonies. When Patrick Henry exclaimed in the first Continen- 
tal Congress, ^'I am not a Virginian, I am an American ! " and 
when John Adams said in 1778, ^'The Confederacy is to make 
us one individual only," they were speaking under the spell of 
the new nationality. A few men from the beginning saw the 
promise of a new national state to emerge from the common 

^The phrase is Professor Van Tyne's in "The American Revolution" (Ameri- 
can Nation Series), p. 182. It was John Adams who called the Continental Con- 
gress a "diplomatic body." Thomas Jefferson, in his "Summary View" (1774), 
called the Congress about to assemble the king's "great American Coungil." 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 109 



struggle and the common aim, but it took the bitter experience 
of years of confusion, impotence, and anarchy under the old 
Confederation, after the war was over, to convince even a 
moderate majority of the voters of the United States of the 
desirability of a real national state. 

Various suggestions of colonial union had been made in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the primary pur- 
pose of defense against the Indians and the French. The 
British government, however, had frowned upon such plans, 
seeing in them a danger to the authority of the royal governors. 
Immediately after the Revolutionary War broke out, and a year 
before independence was declared, Benjamin Franklin pro- 
posed to Congress a plan of intercolonial union, not unlike his 
Albany Plan of 1754, except, of course, that the executive power 
was not to be vested in an English governor-general. The colo- 
nies were to form a ^4eague of friendship for the common de- 
fense and general welfare." They were to elect annually a 
congress which was to have authority to declare and conduct 
war, to make appointments to all general offices, to settle dis- 
putes between the colonies, to regulate commerce and the cur- 
rency. It was just at the moment when the colonies were being 
transformed into states, and they were not ready to commit 
themselves to it. Franklin did not urge the plan further. 

However, the necessity for some kind of legal authority in 
the central government grew as the war progressed. When Lord 
North sought to conciliate the colonies separately in the spring 
of 1775; Jefferson, in behalf of the Virginia assembly, addressed 
Governor Dunmore as follows: ^'We are now represented in a 
general Congress by members approved by the House, where 
the former union [of 1774] it is hoped will be so strongly 
cemented, that no partial application can produce the slightest 
departure from the common cause. We consider ourselves as 
bound in honor as well as interest to share one general fate with 
our sister Colonies, and we should hold ourselves to be base 
deserters of that union to which we have acceded, were we to 
agree to any measures distinct and separate from them." John 
Adams confessed a little later that the states could not exist 



no 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



alone, but must raise an empire of permanent duration." The 
words union" and ^'empire" are doubtless used in a very- 
general sense in these passages ; they do not necessarily imply- 
either an elaborate constitution or a highly centralized author- 
ity. But they do show how necessary some sort of central 
authority was in the eyes of leading statesmen. Certainly, after 
the war as well as during the war, nobody expected or wished 
to see the general government" disappear. It was only a 
question of what share of power should be given to it and what 
share retained by the states. In other words, it was the old 
problem of reconciling local, inherited, and jealously guarded 
power with a new and delegated authority whose scope could 
not easily be forecast. 

The proposal for union was revived with the agitation for 
independence. Lee's famous motion of June 7, 1776, not 
only declared that ^Hhese colonies are, and of right ought to 
be, free and independent states" but also proposed that a 
Confederation be formed ^Ho bind the colonies more closely 
together." A committee of thirteen (one from each of the 
colonies) was chosen to draft articles of union. The com- 
mittee was too large, and except for a few men (Dickinson, 
Sherman, Samuel Adams, Rutledge) it was far inferior to the 
contemporaneous committee of five elected to prepare the Decla- 
ration of Independence. The strenuous business of keeping 
the army together for the first two years of the war prevented 
Congress from giving very serious consideration to the articles 
drafted by Dickinson. ^^They were debated from time to time," 
says Jefferson in his ^^Autobiography." On November 17, 1777, 
Congress, taking advantage of the enthusiasm of the country 
over Burgoyne's surrender, submitted the Articles of Confeder- 
ation to the states for ratification. A translation into French 
was made in order to help win the alliance for which we had 
been striving since the beginning of the war. Ten of the states 
had ratified the Articles by the midsummer of 1778, New Jersey 
and Delaware following within a few months. But Maryland, 
for reasons which we shall notice presently, withheld her con- 
sent until March i, 1 781 . Since the consent of all the states was 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT iii 



necessary to put the Articles into operation, we had no general 
government based on a written constitution until thirty-three 
weeks before the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. 

It is customary for historians to dwell on the weakness of 
the Articles of Confederation : the absence of any national exec- 
utive to act directly on the people of the states, the failure to 
secure to Congress the taxing-power and the regulation of com- 
merce, the lack of a permanent national judiciary extending to 
all parts of the country, the impossibility of commanding the 
respect of the countries abroad when disobedience and defiance 
marked the conduct of the states at home. The decade of 
anarchy and impotence in the national government which 
elapsed between the drafting of the Articles and the summons 
of the Constitutional Convention only too amply illustrated 
those faults. But for all that, the Articles were a very decided 
step toward unity. The Confederation which they established, 
despite its defects, was the closest and most uniform that the 
world had ever seen. Many of the provisions of the Articles 
were taken over bodily into the Constitution of the United 
States. Those which were most constructive were the pledge 
of a common defense (Art. Ill); the complete exchange of 
privileges and immunities between the free inhabitants of all the 
states (Art. IV) ; the restrictions on the sovereignty of the 
states, requiring the consent of Congress for alliances, limiting 
armaments, and prohibiting legislation in conflict with the 
treaties made by Congress (Art. VI) ; the grant of definite and 
very considerable powers to Congress, such as the declaration of 
war, the borrowing of money, the settlement of interstate dis- 
putes, the regulation of currency and of weights and measures, 
the administration of Indian affairs and the post office, etc. 
(Art. IX) ; the assumption of all obligations for paper money 
issued and of all debts contracted by the Continental Con- 
gress. So formidable, in fact, did these powers seem to the 
statesmen of the time that they feared that the states would 
be swallowed up in the national government. ^'If the plan 
now proposed should be adopted," wrote Edward Rutledge 
of South Carolina, ^'nothing less than the ruin of some of the 



112 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

colonies will be the consequence. ... I am resolved to vest 
the Congress with no more power than is absolutely necessary, 
and, to use a familiar expression, to keep the staff in our own 
hands." Governor Cooke of Rhode Island, for fear the state 
should be considered to have surrendered any of its sovereignty, 
significantly called the Articles 'Hhe Treaty of the Confeder- 
ation." With such sentiments abroad, the wonder is that the 
Articles, even with their concession of an equal vote to each 
state, of the immunity of commerce from the central control, 
and of requisitions on the states in place of taxation for raising 
national funds,^ were ratified at all. 

Only eight years after their adoption the Articles of Con- 
federation were superseded by the Constitution of the United 
States. From the point of view of constitutional history, there- 
fore, their importance is slight. How much their very existence 
contributed, however, to the peaceful evolution of the Consti- 
tution, which reconciled the clashing interests of the states 
instead of leaving their correction to insurrection and civil 
war," we cannot tell. One supreme service the Articles did for 
the cause of the Union : they secured the immense tract of land 
between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi as a national do- 
main. As the chief factor in the consolidation of our federal 
government, from New York's cession of her Western claims to 
Congress in 1780 down to Panama's cession of the canal strip 
in 1904, has been the extension of the national authority over 
our new territories or colonies, it is worth while to dwell briefly 
on the origin of our national domain. 

The charters of the colonies of Virginia, Massachusetts, Con- 
necticut, Carolina, and Georgia granted them indefinite west- 
ward extension, in profound ignorance of the width of the 

iThe student will note that the struggle between the advocates of a central 
government and the champions of states' rights was a repetition of the struggle 
between the colonists and the British government which led to the Revolution. 
In the eyes of the states'-rights men like Rutledge, Patrick Henry, Mason, 
and Gerry, the whole process of centralization in our government, which ended 
in the Constitution and the ten-year rule of the Federalist party, was a work 
of "imperial organization" quite parallel to that pursued by the ministers of 
George III from Grenville to Lord North. 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 113 



American continent. The other colonies were less fortunate. 
Either their western boundary was specified in their charter 
(Pennsylvania, Maryland) or they were backed against another 
colony to the west (Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware). 
After the middle of the eighteenth century the British govern- 
ment sought to silence these claims of the ^'sea to sea'^ charters 
of the Stuart period. The Board of Trade prompted the dele- 
gates to the Albany Congress of 1754 to propose that ''the 
bounds of those colonies which extend to the South Sea be 
contracted and limited by the Alleghany or Appalachian moun- 
tains"; and Benjamin Franklin admitted that those colonies 
ought to be reduced ''to dimensions more convenient for the 
common purposes of government." Immediately on the close of 
the French wars, King George by royal proclamation forbade 
the colonists to extend their settlements beyond the ridge of the 
Alleghenies (October 7, 1763). The proclamation was not 
obeyed, for the adventurous frontiersmen of the back country 
of Virginia and the Carolinas were little minded to abandon the 
fine hunting-grounds of the West to the Indians. Before a 
decade had elapsed Daniel Boone and James Robertson were 
piloting their bands through the rich lands south of the Ohio. 
All the Western territory north of the Ohio, in which Virginia, 
New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut had claims, was 
incorporated into the province of Quebec by an act of Parlia- 
ment (1774) which was denounced by the first Continental 
Congress as "impohtic, unjust, and cruel, as well as unconsti- 
tutional and most dangerous and destructive of American 
rights." 

The Revolutionary War wiped out the Proclamation Line 
of 1 763 and the Quebec Act of 1 774, but left the vexing question 
of who inherited the extinguished British sovereignty between 
the Alleghenies and the Mississippi. Did that authority re- 
vert to the states by their old "sea to sea" charters? If so, 
Virginia would become half a continent, with lands and wealth 
ample to pay her war debts, whereas the states without west« 
ward extension would have to resort to heavy taxation. It 
seemed unfair, when the cause for which they had fought the 



114 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



war was a common cause. Yet Congress had to insist on the 
charter claims when dealing with England, because to relin- 
quish them would be to acknowledge England's right to dispose 
of the back lands in the peace negotiations. On the other hand, 
to say, after the peace was made, that the authority of England 
in the West devolved upon the Congress would give to that body 
a power that very few men in America were ready to accord at 
that time. 

The debates in Congress on this dilemma were lively. Chase 
of Maryland said: ^'No colony has a right to go to the South 
Sea : ... It would not be safe for the rest." But the Virginia 
delegates rephed: ^'What security have we that Congress will 
not curtail the present settlements of the States? . . . Vir- 
ginia owns to the South Sea ; you shall not pare away the colony 
[sic/] of Virginia. ... A right does not cease to be a right 
because it is large." A motion in Congress in October, 1777, 
giving that body the right to fix the western boundaries of the 
states and to form new states from time to time out of the land 
beyond — an act important as the first suggestion of the control 
of Congress over the territories — got the affirmative vote of 
Maryland alone. In December, 1778, the Maryland delegates 
in Congress were instructed not to ratify the Articles of Con- 
federation until the obnoxious clause in Article IX, ^^No state 
shall be deprived of territory for the benefit of the United 
States," should be repealed. 

There was but one way to break the deadlock between the 
landed and the landless states, and that was for the former vol- 
untarily to surrender their Western claims. New York, whose 
claims were based not on charter rights but on numerous 
treaties with the Iroquois Indians concluded between 1684 and 
1752, led the way by an act of her legislature in February, 
1780. Within the next decade all the states with Western 
claims had followed except Georgia, whose final action was 
delayed (on account of Indian dangers) until 1802. On the 
day of the execution of New York's deed of cession in 
Congress (March i, 1781) Maryland signed the Articles of 
Confederation. 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 115 



Though Maryland deserves gratitude for insisting on this 
great principle of equity among the states, the chief credit for 
the transaction must be given to Virginia. Her claim alone was 
well founded. If the Stuart charters were to be pleaded, hers 
was the oldest, and in its form of 1609 was inclusive of the 
territory claimed by all the states north of her. If the charters 
were to be disregarded, Virginia could point to her splendid 
conquest of the Northwest during the Revolution. Moreover, 
the attitude of the authorities of Virginia was reasonable and 
conciliatory. No language could be nobler than Jefferson's in 
his proposal to the convention of Pennsylvania for the adjust- 
ment of a disputed boundary west of Fort Pitt (July, 1776) : 
"We can assure you that the colony of Virginia does not enter- 
tain a wish that one inch should be added to theirs from the 
territory of a sister colony, and we have perfect confidence that 
the same just sentiment prevails in your House. . . . The 
decision, whatever it be, will not annihilate the lands. They 
will remain to be occupied by Americans, and whether these be 
counted in the number of this or that of the United States will 
be thought a matter of little moment." And in transmitting to 
Congress the resolution of January 2, 1781, by which Virginia 
agreed to cede its lands in the Northwest on condition that all 
the states accept the Articles, Jefferson, then governor of the 
state, wrote, "I shall be rendered very happy if the other states 
of the Union, equally impressed with the necessity of that im- 
portant Convention [the Articles], shall be willing to sacrifice 
equally to its completion." After language and example of this 
sort the other states could hardly with decency refuse to sur- 
render their shadowy claims, 

March i, 1781, deserves to rank with April 19, 1775, J^V 4? 
1776, and April 30, 1789, among the birthdays of the American 
nation. The first blow struck in arms for liberty, the decla- 
ration of our independence, the inauguration of our first presi- 
dent, are events which have received their full measure of 
attention from historians. But none of these events was fraught 
with more importance than the signature of the Maryland dele- 
gates to the Articles of Confederation and the acceptance by 



Ii6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Congress of New York's cession of Western land claims. By 
the first of these events the United States found itself for the 
first time a legally constituted government with its powers set 
down in black on white, its ^'perpetual union and league of 
friendship" witnessed by the hands of delegates from each of 
the thirteen states. By the second the United States was in- 
vested with the beginnings of a national domain, destined to 
extend to the Pacific, whose stewardship was to prove the 
greatest source of our national wealth and whose governance 
was to invite the chief enlargement of our federal power. 

Anarchy Imminent 

In the same year that the Articles of Confederation were 
adopted, Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, an acrimonious but 
observant critic of American affairs, wrote to Louis XVI's fa- 
mous finance minister Necker in the following terms : As to the 
future Grandeur of America and its being a rising Empire under 
one head, whether Republican or Monarchical, it is one of the 
idlest and most visionary Notions that was ever conceived by 
the writers of Romance. For there is nothing in the Genius of 
the People, the Situation of their Country, or the nature of 
their different Climates which tends to countenance such a 
Supposition. On the contrary, every Prognostic that can be 
formed from a Contemplation of their mutual Antipathies and 
clashing Interests, their Difference of Governments, Habitudes, 
and Manners, plainly indicates that the Americans will have 
no Center of Union among them, and no common Interest to 
pursue, when the Power and Government of England are 
finally removed." 

This dismal prophecy came dangerously near fulfillment in 
the six or seven years succeeding the surrender at Yorktown. 
Serious financial, economic, and diplomatic problems, some 
caused by the war and some by the cessation of the war, called 
for a firm government just at the time when the mutual jeal- 
ousies and tenacious local attachments of the states prevented 
them from entering into a more effective union than that of the 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 117 



"Treaty of the Confederation." It took the bitter experience 
of humiliation abroad and anarchy at home, of poverty, demor- 
alization, and even threatened dissolution of the Confederation, 
to bring the states to a reluctant consent to the establishment of 
a real federal government. Some of the leaders were despondent 
in 1 786-1 787. John Marshall wrote, ^'They have truth on their 
side who say that mankind is incapable of governing himself." 
John Jay confided to Washington that he was more fearful of the 
American cause than at any time during the war. And Washing- 
ton replied to Jay : "Your sentiment that our affairs are drawing 
rapidly to a crisis accords with my own. What the event will be 
is also beyond the reach of my foresight. We have errors to cor- 
rect. We have probably had too good an opinion of human 
nature in forming our confederation. Experience has taught us 
that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures best 
calculated for their own good, without the intervention of a coer- 
cive power. I do not conceive that we can exist long as a nation 
without having lodged somewhere a power which will pervade 
the whole Union in as energetic a manner as the authority of 
the state governments extends over the several states." 

So long as the war lasted the inadequacy of the loose league 
of the states was not wholly apparent. There was actually 
a firmer union during the hostilities, without the Articles, than 
there was with them after peace came. For several consider- 
ations urged the states to hold together and show some respect 
for their central steering committee of Congress. They were 
waging war as a confederation and not as single states; they 
needed to present a united front against Great Britain; they 
could expect aid from France and Holland only as a nation, 
and only as a nation could they secure the recognition of their 
independence. Moreover, each state, under the apprehension 
of invasion, found comfort in the possibility of an appeal to 
the continental army to supplement its militia. But when the 
war was over and independence won, it seemed to many that 
the union had accomplished its purpose. The "general govern- 
ment" might remain, to be sure, to carry out the will of the 
states in those matters on which it was desirable to act in 



Ii8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

unison, — foreign war, diplomacy, interstate controversies, the 
disposition of national territory, and the like, — but in all these 
things it should still be the servant and agent of the states. It 
could not levy taxes or control commerce or compel a state to 
pay its quota for the general expenses, for it had no executive 
or judicial organs for enforcing its laws. It was, as Gouver- 
neur Morris said, ^'a government by supplication." Being poor 
and subservient at home, it naturallly could not speak with 
authority abroad. When Rhode Island defied Congress, Great 
Britain could hardly be expected to respect that body. 

Yet it would be hard to find a period in our history when a 
strong, efficient government was more needed than at the close 
of the Revolutionary War. Our debt, foreign and domestic, 
amounted to $43,000,000, of which nearly $8,000,000 had been 
borrowed in Europe.^ The interest on this debt could be paid 
only by a vigorous system of taxation. The people of the United 
States were, as Robert Morris wrote to Franklin, ^^undoubtedly 
able to pay." They were spending freely at the close of the war. 
^^Extravagant luxury," insatiable thirst for riches," ^'specula- 
tion and peculation," ^'an alarming spirit of venality," are some 
of the phrases which sober men Hke Washington, Franklin, and 
Adams used to characterize the age. Pelatiah Webster, a dis- 
tinguished political essayist of the time, wrote, "Tho' the public 
treasury was so distressed, yet the states were really overrun 
with an abundance of cash : the French and English armies, our 
foreign loans, Havannah trade, etc. had filled the country with 
money." The control of this money, however, the states deter- 
mined to keep in their own hands. By a false and foolish 
analogy they extended their hatred of general taxation to their 
own central government, declaring against the ^Hyranny" of 
^'King Congress" as fervently as they had against that of King 
George. They had fought the war to escape taxation by any 
power except that of their own legislatures. Let Congress ^^ask" 
for the money, and the legislatures would grant it. 

^During the war France had lent us $6,500,000; Holland, $1,300,000; and 
Spain, $200,000. After the war the Dutch lent us $2,000,000 more. About one fifth 
of what we borrowed abroad was used to pay the interest on our domestic debt. 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 119 



The way in which the states honored the request of Congress 
for money must have made persons whose memory reached 
back twenty years somewhat lenient in their judgment of Great 
Britain's refusal to rely on requisitions from the colonies in- 
stead of taxation. During the entire period of the Confeder- 
ation, Congress got only $6,000,000 of the $16,000,000 assessed 
on the states. In the two years after the surrender at Yorktown, 
Congress asked for $10,000^000. By June, 1784, $1,486,511 
had been paid in. New Hampshire paid S3 000 of her quota of 
$450,000; Massachusetts, $247,000 of her Si, 600,000; New 
York, $39,000 of her $465,000; Virginia, $115,000 of her 
$1,590,000 ; and so on down the line. Delaware, North Carolina, 
and Georgia paid absolutely nothing. No state except South 
Carolina paid more than 2 5 per cent of its assessment. The result 
was more borrowing and a piling up of the interest charges 
until they came to overbalance the total receipts. The arrears 
of interest on the domestic debt grew from $3,000,000 to 
$11,000,000 in the five years preceding Washington's inaugu- 
ration. Robert Morris, the superintendent of the finances, 
resigned because it did not consist with his ideas of integrity 
^'to increase our debts while the prospect of paying them 
diminished." 

From this intolerable situation Congress sought relief in vain. 
In February, 1781, it asked for the power to levy an import 
duty of 5 per cent solely for the purpose of paying the interest 
and principal of debts contracted on the faith of the United 
States. But Rhode Island refused her consent, and Virginia, 
after granting it, withdrew it on the ground that her sover- 
eignty would be impaired and her liberty endangered. Again, 
in April, 1783, Congress asked the right to levy a small import 
duty for a period of twenty-five years; but after a delay of 
three years, only nine states had been persuaded to a grudging 
consent. Governor Clinton of New York, when finally the 
consent of his state alone was needed to put the duty into 
effect, refused to call the legislature, on the ground that he had 
power to do so only on ^^extraordinary occasions." Apparently 
the impending bankruptcy of the United States was not an 



120 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



extraordinary affair! Robert Morris declared that exhorting 
the states to tax their inhabitants for the support of the Union 
was like ^'preaching to the dead." 

To add to the distress of the Treasury, there was dire con- 
fusion in the currency. When the war broke out, Congress, 
having no money and no source of income, had to resort to bor- 
rowing. The colonies, being largely agricultural communities, 
had little accumulated capital to lend, while the interruption of 
our commerce with the British ports deprived the farmers of 
the currency with which to pay their taxes. Foreign loans could 
be expected only when there was good promise of the success 
of the American cause. Congress, therefore, had to resort to 
forced loans in the shape of issues of paper money. Unsecured 
paper money is like a poison in the currency system of a state. 
If the dose is small and the financial health of the country is 
vigorous, the harm is not great — the poison is absorbed. But as 
the dose becomes larger and the health of the country weaker, 
disastrous results follow. The value of the paper falls with a 
rapidity proportional to the waning confidence of the people 
in the ability of the government to redeem it in gold and silver. 
The government then tries to recoup its loss by new issues of 
paper — or to cure the evil by increasing it. So, beginning 
with a modest issue of $2,000,000 in 1776, Congress had multi- 
plied the continental paper currency a hundredfold by the 
autumn of 1 779. Twenty dollars in paper were required to pay 
for merchandise which one dollar of silver would buy. A hat 
cost $40, a barrel of flour $150. A year later the paper had sunk 
to one fortieth of its nominal value in silver ; and still another 
year and a half later, shortly after the adoption of the Articles 
of Confederation, the continental paper ceased to be used as 
currency, but was bought and sold by speculators at prices 
ranging all the way from a mill to a quarter of a cent on a 
dollar (May 30, 1781). 

While the Continental Congress was learning the truth of 
Thomas Paine's remark that money is money and paper is 
paper, and all the inventions of man cannot make it otherwise,'^ 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 121 



while it saw its ^^fiat" dollars becoming so cheap that a barber 
papered his shop with them and a wag feathered his tarred 
dog with them, the British and French soldiers and the new 
trade with the French and Spanish Indies were bringing coin 
into the country in amounts to encourage extravagance. But 
when the war was over, our specie began to be drained away 
with startling rapidity. The balance of trade ran strongly 
against us. For the year 1 784 our imports from Great Britain 
amounted to $18,500,000, a figure swollen somewhat by Eng- 
land's determination to glut the American market and destroy 
the manufactures which had been begun during the war. Our 
exports to British ports in the same year were only $3,750,000. 
The war had turned us from colonies of Great Britain into a 
foreign nation, and therewith the Navigation Acts automat- 
ically excluded us from a trade with the British which, though 
hampered by exasperating regulations, had nevertheless been 
highly profitable to us before the Revolution. To be sure, as an 
independent nation we were now free to make such commercial 
treaties as we pleased with foreign powers, to secure our share 
of the trade of the world. But the lack of authority in Con- 
gress to regulate our commerce by uniform restrictions on the 
states stood in the way of such treaties. As for getting better 
terms with England, we were in the position of suppliants who 
had but yesterday been rebels. John Adams, presented as our 
first minister at the court of St. James, in May, 1 785, endeavored 
in several interviews with Lord Carmarthen and William Pitt to 
secure some privileges for American trade in the British Empire. 
But the ministry assumed the attitude of beati possidentes. 
They already had the lion's share of America's patronage, and 
saw no need of raising up a rival to their export trade across 
the Atlantic by opening the West Indian ports to American 
vessels. With Congress unable to force the states to adopt a 
general navigation act, Great Britain had nothing to fear in the 
way of retaliation or reprisals from America. Pitt smiled 
urbanely while Adams pleaded. And Adams, consumed with 
chagrin, wrote to Jefferson (who was having his own difficulties 



122 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



in Paris, trying to get our wheat, tobacco, and whale oil admit- 
ted to the French ports), ^'In short, sir, I am Hkely to be as 
insignificant here as you can imagine." 

So the drain of specie continued. The bark Mary Brainard, 
sailing from Boston in the autumn of 1786, carried back to 
London nearly $50,000 in Spanish, French, and British coins, 
while the farmers in the western counties of Massachusetts were 
toiling to scrape together a few silver pieces to pay their taxes 
and to still the demands of private creditors who were filhng the 
courts with suits against them. The precious metals were going 
out of the country to buy luxuries and British gewgaws." 
The embattled farmers," who had left their plows to take their 
rifles, had a fine reward for their years of sacrifice : suffering, 
hunger, and rags in the service ; a discharge without a farthing 
in their pockets; a return to acres burdened with debt, with 
eviction or imprisonment threatening, and the taxgatherer 
abroad in the land. The usurer reaped his accustomed harvest 
of plunder from the poor. When the farmer received conti- 
nental loan certificates for his services in war or his produce in 
peace, he was obliged to part with them at a discount for 
ready cash, and speculators accumulated for trifling sums the 
paper obligations which the government redeemed a few years 
later at their full face value. 

Everywhere, naturally, in this stress of poverty the debtor 
class demanded the issue of paper money by the state to replace 
the specie which was being drained out of the country. In 
Rhode Island the paper-money men got control of the legisla- 
ture and paralyzed business by forcing the creditor to accept the 
depreciated scrip at its face value. In Massachusetts, where the 
hard-money men kept control of the government, the debtors 
of the western counties rose in revolt under Captain Daniel 
Shays, forcibly closed the courts at Concord and Worcester, 
attacked the arsenal at Springfield, and kept the state in terror 
for five months, until dispersed by the militia in a pitched battle 
at Petersham (February, 1787). Add to such scenes as these 
the vain appeals of Congress for authority to raise a revenue 
by import duties or to control commerce by a navigation act, 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 123 



the selfish disregard of each state for the economic welfare of 
its neighbors/ tariff wars and boundary disputes between the 
states,^ the refusal of the states to pay their assessed quotas for 
the support of the general government,^ and it is little wonder 
that the United States under the Confederation, without an 
executive department, without an army or navy, without money, 
credit, or authority, failed to win the respect even of the semi- 
barbarous states of Morocco and Tripoli. 

Important diplomatic questions were pending in the years 
immediately following the war, which needed the backing of a 
strong and united government. We did not yet enjoy that 
splendid isolation from European entanglements which Wash- 
ington counseled in his ^'Farewell Address" of 1796, and which 
became a fact at the close of our second war with England, in 
181 5. Aside from our money obHgations to France, Holland, 
and Spain, we were involved in the commercial and political 
rivalries of the Old World. Our entry into the family of nations 
had been a European event. The Declaration of Independence 
was an apology for our behavior, submitted to a ^'candid world." 
One of the earliest committees of the Continental Congress was 
appointed for the purpose of seeking European alliances and 
loans. The treaty of peace of 1783 made a web of European 
complications and left us difficult problems to settle, especially 
with Great Britain and Spain, our vexatious neighbors on the 
north, west, and south. 

The British claimed indemnification for the Tories whose 
property had been confiscated, and full payment of the debts 

iJn a debate in the Virginia assembly in 1786, on the proposition to give 
Congress the control of foreign trade, Charles Thurston said that it was "very 
doubtful whether it would not be better to encourage the British rather than 
the eastern (New England, New York, Philadelphia) marine." 

2 New York taxed firewood from Connecticut and farm truck from New Jersey 
landing at its docks. New Jersey replied with a tax on a lighthouse which New 
York had built on Jersey soil (Sandy Hook), and the Connecticut farmers formed 
a nonexportation association to starve New York into brotherly conduct. 

3 In February, 1786, the legislature of New Jersey complained that her quota 
was too high ($166,000) and refused to pay. A committee of Congress visited 
Trenton and implored the state not to fail the Union in so critical a time. The 
legislature rescinded the vote, — but waited five months before paying the money. 



124 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

due to British merchants, with the interest accrued during the 
war. For security they held on to several rich fur-trading posts 
along the southern shores of the Great Lakes in territory ceded 
to the United States by the treaty of 1783 (see map, p. loi). 
We put in the counterclaim of the theft of negro slaves after the 
war and the seizure by British cruisers of a large part of the very 
merchandise for which the British merchants were asking pay- 
ment. We demanded the evacuation of the fur posts. The letters 
of all our public men who dealt with the British government in 
these critical years are filled with complaints of the animosity of 
the ministry, the Parliament, and the press against the new re- 
public. Benjamin Franklin, writing from Paris to the president 
of Congress on Christmas Day, 1783, says of the British court: 
^'We should, I think, be constantly on our guard and impress 
strongly on our minds that, though it has made peace with us, 
it is not in truth reconciled either to us or to its loss of us. . . . 
It is easy to see by the general tone of the ministerial news- 
papers and by the malignant improvement their ministers make 
in all the foreign courts of every little accident or dissension 
among us, . . . all which are exaggerated to represent our 
governments as so many anarchies of which the people them- 
selves are weary, . . . that they bear us no good will, and that 
they wish the reality of what they are pleased to imagine."^ 
For eight years after the treaty of peace the British govern- 
ment refused to send a minister to the United States, Lord 
Carmarthen hinting to Adams with malicious sarcasm that 
thirteen ministers would be necessary for diplomatic business 
with America. 

With Spain we were engaged in a diplomatic struggle per- 
haps the most important in our history, for it brought the first 
test of the fidelity of the sections of our country to the Union 
and put in jeopardy the allegiance of the vast region between the 
Alleghenies and the Mississippi. The flag of Spain has now dis- 
appeared from both the continents and the islands of the 
Western world, and we find it difficult to realize how vast was 

'■For confirmation of this feeling see Jefferson's letter from Paris to John 
Page, May 4, 1786 (P.L.Ford, "Writings of Thomas Jefferson," Vol. IV, p. 214). 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 125 



her colonial empire on these shores at the close of the American 
Revolution. The Gulf of Mexico was then a Spanish lake: 
every mile of its shore from the tip of Florida to the tip of 
Yucatan was under Spain's flag. Holding the mouth of the 
Mississippi, she controlled the commerce of the great river 
basin. AH the country west of the Mississippi to the Pacific 
coast was acknowledged Spanish domain by the treaty of 1763. 
Spain had hesitatingly joined France in the war against Eng- 
land in 1779 solely for the purpose of recovering Gibraltar, 
Minorca, and Florida, which she had been forced to give to 
England in the Treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Paris (1763). 
Spain did not, like France, become an ally of the United States. 
She had no sympathy with revolting colonies in America, and 
she did not acknowledge our independence until England 
had conceded it. She opposed our negotiations for peace in 
1782, because she had not yet got her coveted spoils of war. 
When the peace was concluded she refused to agree to the 
eighth article, which declared that the navigation of the Missis- 
sippi should be free to both nations. She was determined to 
keep the new United States from becoming a strong rival power 
in America. It was her ambassador in Paris, Count Aranda, who 
proposed to Vergennes the plan of hemming in the new nation 
between the Alleghenies and the sea, leaving the back country 
as Indian territory. When that plan failed and the American 
pioneers swarmed across the mountains to the fertile valleys 
of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, Spain sealed 
up the mouth of the great trunk river to their commerce.^ 

These pioneers were a hardy race of men, who, in their own 
language in a memorial to Congress, had ^'inherited the highest 
and most extensive ideas of liberty." The lure of adventure, 
the appeal of the virgin soil, the chance of escape from the 
taxgatherer and the inquisitive lawyer, were potent motives for 

1 Spain's resentment against the United States was heightened, but the situa- 
tion was not materially changed, by the discovery in 1784 of a secret clause in 
the treaty between England and the United States, according to which we were 
to accept the parallel of 32° 30' as our southern boundary from the Mississippi to 
the Chattahoochee in case England retained Florida, but should come down to 
31° if Florida should be restored to Spain — as it was in fact (see map, p. loi). 



126 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



migration. The pioneers, like the early settlers of Plymouth 
and the Connecticut valley, carried with them a simple political 
philosophy. The land was God's earth, and whoever wished 
might settle where he would. There were no distinctions of 
birth or wealth in the little clearing edged by the primeval 
forest." The men formed associations to punish thieving, re- 
strain lawlessness, and guard their settlements from becoming 
"asylums for fugitives from justice and their just debts." They 
organized themselves into military companies, the Kentuckians 
offering "a respectable body of prime riflemen" to aid George 
Rogers Clark in his campaign of 1778. The existence of these 
pioneer settlements was one of the chief factors in the surrender 
to Congress of the Western land claims of the states and the 
creation of that national domain which, as we have seen, was 
one of the greatest sources of strength and authority to the 
Union. 

The Western settlers naturally wanted the free use of the 
Mississippi. As early as 1780 they prayed Congress that "the 
trade on the western waters" might be opened for their relief ; 
and John Jay, the Secretary of Congress, was soon afterward 
laboring in Madrid to secure this boon. But the Spanish 
minister Florida-Blanca told Jay that his master the king re- 
garded the exclusion of all foreigners from the Mississippi as 
far more important even than the recovery of Gibraltar. Jay 
left Madrid in 1782 to take part in the peace negotiations at 
Paris, but on the arrival at Philadelphia of Gardoqui, the first 
Spanish minister to the United States, Jay, then Secretary for 
Foreign Affairs, resumed the diplomatic negotiations. The 
Eastern states wanted a commercial treaty with Spain which 
should admit their lumber, wheat, whale oil, fish, indigo, and 
naval stores into the Spanish ports, bringing in return much 
needed specie into the United States. Such a treaty would also 
influence France, Portugal, and the Mediterranean powers to 
make favorable terms for our shipping. As an offset to these 
advantages the right of a few thousand back countrymen to 
carry their hogs and tobacco to the Spanish ports on the lower 
Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico seemed trifling. Why 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 127 



should the settlement of the West be encouraged anyway? It 
only drained off men needed for the industries at home and 
brought the new clearings into competition with the unoccupied 
areas in the old states, making labor dearer and land cheaper. 
The Southern states^ with larger patriotic vision, supported 
the claims of the Western settlers and warned Congress that 
if it abandoned them to the pitiless Spanish policy of exclusion 
they might throw off their allegiance. Spanish agents were 
already busy sowing gold and discontent among the settlers — 
and gold looked attractive to men who were reduced to paying 
their taxes in grain, skins, and whisky. 

Jay, after endless haggling with Gardoqui, negotiated a com- 
promise treaty in 17,85, by which Spain was to make certain 
concessions to our Atlantic trade, but to keep the Mississippi 
closed to American boats for twenty-five years. The new West 
was in an uproar. An American trader's goods were confiscated 
at Natchez, and in return the Spanish stores at Vincennes were 
plundered. The new state of Franklin offered to raise 1500 
men ^Ho thrust the perfidious Castilian into a better conduct 
towards the people of the United States." A letter to Jay, pur- 
porting to come from a gentleman at the falls of the Ohio, 
declared that ^Ho make us vassals to the Spaniards is a griev- 
ance not to be borne." Twenty thousand troops," he contin- 
ued, ^^can easily be raised west of the Alleghanies to drive the 
Spaniards from their settlements at the mouth of the river. If 
this is not countenanced in the east, we will throw off our 
allegiance and look elsewhere for help. Nor will we seek in 
vain, for even now Great Britain stands with open arms to 
receive us." Washington declared that the West stood upon 
a pivot — ^^the touch of a feather will turn them any way." 
Loyal as the men of the West were to the Union, the prospect 
of being condemned to a quarter of a century of economic 
stagnation for the benefit of the merchant princes of Boston 
and New York was enough to shake their allegiance ; and the 
brutally frank assertion of Gorham of Massachusetts that it 
would be a good thing for the Atlantic states to have the Mis- 
sissippi closed for twenty-five years drew from Madison a 



128 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



stinging rebuke for selfish sectional feeling. The Jay-Gardoqul 
treaty failed to be ratified by the requisite number of states 
(nine), but the lesson of it was plain. Jefferson wrote from 
Paris in December, 1786, that the disposition to shut up the 
Mississippi gave him ^'serious apprehensions of the severance 
of the Eastern and Western parts of our Confederacy.'^ 

Although the important diplomatic controversies were with 
England and Spain, our foreign ministers everywhere felt their 
insignificance under the weak government of the Confederation. 
"We are the lowest and most obscure of the whole diplomatic 
tribe," wrote Jefferson in bitterness from Paris. France was 
our ally, but she opened only four of her home ports to our 
ships and revoked the complete freedom of trade which she 
had given us in the Indies during the war with England. Jef- 
ferson could make no head against the corrupt ring of tax- 
farmers who controlled the tobacco trade in France. The 
ministers of Louis XVI told him plainly that they could not 
recognize the American Congress as a "government." The 
Dutch bankers were anxious about their loans to the new 
republic and kept writing to Paris to be assured that repudia- 
tion and bankruptcy were not imminent. The pirates of the 
Barbary States seized our vessels in the Mediterranean, holding 
American seamen for ransom. An "ambassador" from Tripoli 
visited John Adams in London and demanded 30,000 guineas 
for each of the four Barbary powers (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, 
and Tripoli) as the price of a commercial treaty. As 120,000 
guineas was half again as much as the total receipts of Congress, 
there was little temptation to yield to this blackmailing invi- 
tation. Jefferson wrote home urging that the United States 
"begin a navy and decide on a war with these pyrates," adding 
that Paul Jones with half a dozen frigates would totally destroy 
their commerce. "Be assured," he says, "that the present dis- 
respect of the nations of Europe for us will inevitably bring us 
insults which must involve us in war : a coward is much more 
exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit." 

Some influential men even despaired of republican govern- 
ment at all. "The late turbulent scenes in Massachusetts 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 129 



[Shays's Rebellion] and infamous ones in Rhode Island/' wrote 
Madison early in 1787, ^^have done inexpressible injury to the 
republican character in that part of the United States ; and a 
propensity towards monarchy is said to have been produced by 
it in some leading minds.'' Jay also, in a letter to Washington, 
expressed the fear that ^4f faction should long bear down law 
and government . . . the more sober part of the people may 
even think of a king." That some not only thought of a king 
but even made serious advances in seeking a candidate for the 
American throne is proved beyond a doubt by a letter dis- 
covered in the Prussian Hausarchiv at Charlottenburg (Berlin) 
and published in the American Historical Review for October, 
191 1. The letter was written by Prince Henry of Prussia, 
brother-in-law of Frederick the Great, to Baron Steuben, who 
made his home in New York after the American Revolution. 
It contains a respectful but firm declination to attempt to make 
good in the office in which George III had so recently failed.^ 

Of course, these evils, foreign and domestic, were not the 
fault of the Articles of Confederation. They were in part the 
heritage of the war and in part due to social and political 
causes reaching far back into the colonial period. The rivalry 
between the debtor communities on the inland farms and the 
wealthy merchants and bankers of the coast regions, who lent 
them money at high rates of interest and bought up the best 
lands of the West at a few cents an acre ; ^ the reluctance in a 

iMany years later (December, 1816) James Monroe, then president-elect, in 
a letter to Andrew Jackson, declared that some of the leaders in 1 786-1 787 ^'en- 
tertained principles unfriendly to our system of government" and meant to make 
a change in it ; and that they were disappointed in not getting the assent of 
George Washington (see Monroe, "Works," ed. Hamilton, Vol. V, p. 343). 

2 "In 1784 Washington traveled through the mountains to the Kanawha, and 
returning wrote several interesting and important letters on the subject of the 
Western lands. He declared that such was the rage for speculating in and 
forestalling lands that scarce a valuable spot within easy reach of the Ohio 
was left without a claimant. Men talked of 50,000 acres or even 500,000 with 
as much facility as a gentleman formerly did of 1000" (Edward Channing, 
"History of the United States," Vol. Ill, p. 530). Washington's own holdings 
of Western land, according to his will, were 41,136 acres, exclusive of his lands 
in the settled parts of Virginia. 



130 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



time of economic depression to pay taxes to be sent to a remote 
treasury and spent for objects of dubious benefit; the harsh 
effects of the British Navigation Acts and the jealous Spanish 
poHcy of closing the Mississippi, — all would have existed even 
if the strongest kind of federal government had been devised 
in 1780. Proof of this is the fact that these evils did not dis- 
appear until long after the Constitution was adopted. But 
these problems revealed more clearly every year the inadequacy 
of the Articles to keep the Union together. By 1786 the great 
majority of influential men had been converted to the position 
which a few like Hamilton, Washington, and Madison had 
reached before the treaty of peace was signed; namely, that 
more power must be lodged with Congress if we were to vindi- 
cate our independence before the nations of the world. ^^To 
be more exposed in the eyes of the world and more contemptible 
than we are already," wrote Washington, ^'is hardly possible. 
. . . The Confederation appears to me to be little more than 
a shadow without a substance. . . . We are fast verging to 
anarchy and confusion." 

The tendency of our historical writing has been to do full 
justice to the ^'anarchy and confusion" under the Articles, in 
order that they may serve as a foil against which the almost 
supernatural virtues of the Constitution shall shine with an 
added brilliancy. But in spite of the deserved disparagement 
of the Articles, several important positive contributions to 
nationalism were made under them and by them in the trying 
years of our critical period. The Union was actually held 
together and Union sentiment was undoubtedly stronger in 
1787 than at the close of the war. SectionaHsm was rebuked 
and even hissed on the floor of Congress. The great back coun- 
try was rapidly settled by men who looked to the national 
government for protection and petitioned Congress for state- 
hood. Through the voluntary surrender of their Western claims 
by several of the states an immense national domain was ac- 
quired, whose sale held the promise (when the Indians should 
be subjugated and the quarrel with Spain settled) of extinguish- 
ing the whole domestic debt. Our diplomacy, if not successful. 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 131 



was able and dignified in the hands of Adams, Jay, and Jeffer- 
son. Treaties of commerce were concluded with Prussia and 
some of the minor states of Europe, and by 1789 such a mitiga- 
tion of the commercial policy of England, France, and Spain 
had been secured that our trade with the West Indies was con- 
siderably improved/ In addition, we had opened new routes 
of trade to China and the East Indies. The Empress^ sailing 
from New York on Washington's birthday, 1784, returned from 
the Orient in May, 1785, loaded with silks, tea, ivory, and 
spices — the first American vessel to visit the Celestial Empire. 
Four years later eighteen American ships were reported in the 
harbor of Canton. These were no mean accomplishments in 
the midst of the financial distress and political impotence under 
which our government was laboring. 

Finally, Congress in its last will and testament under the 
Articles of Confederation accomplished a work of great national 
importance in the organization of the territory north of the 
Ohio River. The influence of the frontier on the development 
of American nationality has been so constant and so potent, its 
contribution to the American ideals of liberty, democracy, and 
union so incalculable, that the first effective plan for the 
organization of the Western territory, the Northwest Ordinance, 
deserves special emphasis. It laid the foundation of our colo- 
nial policy — that process by which we pushed our settlements 
westward, subduing the Indian wilderness to civilized life, until 
our frontier vanished beyond the sunsets of the Golden Gate, 
and an unbroken band of states reached from ocean to ocean. 
The Ordinance of 1787 provided for territorial governments in 
the Northwest with "admission to a share in federal councils 
on an equal footing with the original thirteen states at as early 

1 British exports to the United States in 1789 and 1790 were £2,525,298 
and £3,431,775 respectively, as against £1,603,465 in 1786. "It is safe to say," 
writes Professor Channing, "that in the year of the ratification of the Con- 
stitution of the United States [1788] the foreign commerce [interrupted by the 
war] had been reestabHshed." So Professor Callender: "Economic conditions 
changed from extreme depression to almost normal prosperity before the new 
government came into existence in the spring of 1789 and before any of its 
measures had time to produce an effect." 



132 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



periods as may be consistent with the general interests." It 
pledged the states made from this territory to perpetual ad- 
herence to the Union. It guaranteed a political and social 
democracy by prohibiting the entail of property and the intro- 
duction of slavery. It secured full liberty of conscience and 
worship. It made provision for public education and extended 
the privilege of Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, due process of 
law, and the sanctity of contracts to the new region. In a word, 
it made the territories of the United States not subject lands but 
sister lands, educated from their first settlement to take their 
place eventually as full members in the family of states. Daniel 
Webster said in the United States Senate forty years after the 
passage of the Ordinance, ^^I doubt whether any single law of 
any lawgiver ancient or modern has produced effects of more 
distinct and lasting character." And Senator George F. Hoar, 
in his address on the centennial anniversary of the first settle- 
ment made in this territory (at Marietta, 1788), declared that 
the Ordinance of 1787 ^'belongs with the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and the Constitution as one of the three title deeds 
of American constitutional liberty." 

The economist Tench Coxe read a paper on the reform of 
our commercial system before a group of publicists and scholars 
gathered at Benjamin Franklin's house in Philadelphia just a 
fortnight before the delegates from a quorum of the states 
arrived in that city for the opening of the Constitutional 
Convention. ^^The foundations of national wealth and con- 
sequence," he said, "are so firmly laid in the United States, 
that no foreign power can undermine or destroy them. But 
the enjoyment of these substantial blessings is rendered pre- 
carious by domestic circumstances. Scarcely held together by 
a weak and half-formed federal constitution, the powers of our 
national government are unequal to the complete execution 
of any salutary purpose, foreign or domestic. . . . We must 
immediately remedy this defect or suffer exceedingly. ... If 
we are to continue one people, a system which will promote the 
general interests with the smallest injury to the particular ones 
has become indispensably necessary." The day of remedy was 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 133 



at hand. Even as Coxe was speaking the members were gather- 
ing for that immortal summer's work, from May to September, 
1787, which produced the Constitution of the United States. 

The Constitution 

Five generations of Americans have lived under the Consti- 
tution of the United States. They have seen the area of our 
country more than trebled, with distant tropical islands added 
as colonies. They have seen our population increase twenty- 
fivefold and our wealth over sixtyfold. They have seen 
millions of the poor and oppressed, swept from the dusty 
corners of Europe, seeking on these shores the freedom and 
opportunity denied to them at home. Orators, statesmen, and 
historians have celebrated the Constitution as the source of 
these political blessings, in terms so extravagant that some- 
thing like a cult arose to put the document among those things 
which a nation with loving reverence has determined to place 
beyond all question." Gladstone spoke of it as a kind of sudden 
inspiration or revelation — ^'the most wonderful work ever 
struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man." 
John Marshall, for thirty years chief justice of the Supreme 
Court, spoke of the Constitution as ^^an expression of the clear 
and deliberate will of the whole people." 

It is no disparagement to the Constitution that a newer school 
of political writers, intent on studying the wonderful document 
in its social and economic origins, have shown such statements 
as Gladstone's and Marshall's to be quite far from the truth. 
The Constitution was not a sudden inspiration but a most 
laborious achievement. Every clause of it grew out' of the pro- 
blems with which the Confederation was confronted. So far 
from being the expression of ^Hhe clear and deliberate will of 
the whole people," it was the work of a very small and select 
class/ It was formulated by a convention of fifty-five men 

^In the sixth volume of his "History of the United States" (p. 450), 
George Bancroft says, "The people of the States demanded a federal convention 
to form the Constitution, ... the Federal Congress offered that Constitution 



134 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



chosen by the state legislatures^ which were all restricted to the 
representatives of property interests. It was debated in secret 
sessions, with sentinels posted at the door of the hall. It was 
accepted by great states like Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and 
Virginia only after bitter conflicts in the ratifying conventions. 
New York adopted it by a margin of only three votes. It was 
'^extorted," as John Adams said, ^^from a reluctant people by 
grinding necessity." It was bitterly fought over, clause by 
clause, by the representatives of the opposing interests of the 
large and the small states, the Eastern merchants and the South- 
ern planters, until it seemed likely to the sanest mind in the 
Convention that the members would disperse without reaching 
any agreement/ 

In our study of the rise and development of the American 
nation the formation of the Constitution is a topic of the first 
importance. The Declaration of Independence announced, and 
the treaty of 1783 confirmed, the existence of the new nation. 
But as yet we were a nation without a state, like the Saxon 
tribes in England before Alfred the Great, or the principalities 
of Germany and Italy before the work of Bismarck and Ca- 
vour. A nation without a state is like a spirit without a body, 
an idea without form. The Constitution furnished that body 
and form. It provided an effective government to hold freedom 
in the check of law, and it has proved, on the whole, the most 
successful attempt ever made in the world's history to reconcile 
the conflicting forces of liberty and authority. With very few 
amendments it has been adapted to the needs of a country 
whose rapid growth has been one of the marvels of modern 
history, and it is today the oldest written constitution in force 
among the nations of Christendom. 

severally to the people of each State, and by their united voice ... it was 
made the binding form of government." Every clause of this passage is erroneous. 

1 Washington wrote to Hamilton, July lo, 1787, in the midst of the deliber- 
ations of the Convention : " I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue, and do 
therefore repent having had any agency in the business. The men who oppose a 
strong and energetic government are, in my opinion, narrow-minded politicians 
or else under the influence of local views. . . . The crisis is equally important 
and alarming." 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 135 

In September, 1780, six months before the Articles of Con- 
federation went into effect, the prescient genius of Alexander 
Hamilton detected the causes of the weakness of Congress, and 
in a letter to Madison he suggested the immediate summons of a 
convention of all the states ^'with full authority to conclude 
finally on a form of general Confederation ... to give Con- 
gress complete sovereignty in all that relates to war, peace, 
trade, finance, and management of foreign affairs," and *Ho pro- 
vide certain perpetual revenues . . . which together with the 
duties on trade and the unlocated [unsurveyed] lands, would 
give Congress a substantial existence and a stable foundation." 
Every year that passed revealed more clearly the wisdom of 
Hamilton's recommendations and increased the number of dis- 
tinguished voices demanding an adequate government. Pages 
could be filled with quotations from Washington's letters from 
1 78 1 on, urging reform. In 1783 he addressed a circular letter 
to all the governors of the states from his headquarters at New- 
burgh, where he had just stifled an incipient mutiny : There is 
an option still left to the United States. This is the moment to 
establish or ruin their national character forever. ... It is yet 
to be decided whether the Revolution must be considered a bless- 
ing or a curse." And three years later, when the evils of the 
Confederation had reduced us to scarce the appearance of a 
government," he wrote, ^'I do not conceive that we can exist long 
as a nation without having lodged somewhere a power which will 
pervade the whole Union in as energetic a manner as the 
authority of the State governments extends over the several 
States." 

Thomas Jefferson is generally cited as the advocate of large 
local powers against a central federal authority. Yet he wrote 
from Paris to Madison in 1786, ^^The policies of Europe render 
it indispensibly necessary that with respect to everything exter- 
nal we be one nation only, firmly hooped together"; and to 
Monroe a few months later, There will be no money in the 
treasury until the Confederacy shows its teeth ; the states must 
see the rod, and perhaps it must be felt by some of them." 
With respect to things internal too this same disastrous year 



136 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



of 1786 was revealing the need of a nation ^'firmly hooped 
together." The East and the South were nearly ready to part 
company on the ^Mississippi question. War was imminent 
between several states over disputed boundaries and land 
claims. Civil war was actually ablaze in ]\Iassachusetts in 
Shays's Rebellion. A group of ^'Hartford wits," in verse lugu- 
brious enough to match the situation, celebrated the reign of 
anarchy in the mock epic ^^The xAnarchiad": 

Thy Constitution, Chaos, is restored. 

Law sinks before thy uncreating Word. 

Thy hand unbars th' unfathomed gulf of fate, 

And in deep darkness 'whelms the new-born state. 

To the Virginia legislature^ and especially to James !Madison, 
is due the credit for starting the negotiations which led directly 
to the new Constitution. jNIaryland and Virginia had a long- 
standing dispute over the navigation of the Potomac and the 
waters of Chesapeake Bay. On the last day of the session of 
1784 Madison got the Virginia legislature to appoint a com- 
mittee to treat with ]Maryland^ and the latter state, well dis- 
posed to her powerful neighbor on account of Mrginia's recent 
cession of her lands in the West, responded heartily. The 
committees met at Alexandria^ March 28, 1785, and soon ad= 
journed, by Washington's invitation, to ]\Iount Vernon, where 
the conference widened into a general discussion of commerce 
among the ^Middle States. It was felt that Delaware and 
Penns^dvania should participate, and ^Maryland then made the 
suggestion that delegates from all the states meet to confer on 
commerce and navigation. In January, 1786, the Virginia 
legislature issued a call for such a meeting to be held at 
Annapolis, ^Maryland, ^^to take into consideration the trade 
of the United States . . . and to consider how far a uniform 
system in their commercial regulations may be necessary to 
their commxOn interests and their permanent harmony." Only 
five states were represented at Annapohs in September, 1786. 
though four more had appointed delegates. The}^ were too few 
to attempt any alterations in the form of government, but they 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 137 



adopted a report by Alexander Hamilton, calling for a conven- 
tion of all the states ^'to meet at Philadelphia, on the second 
Monday of May [1787], to consider the situation of the United 
States and devise such further provisions as should appear 
necessary to render the constitution of the federal government 
adequate to the exigencies of the Union." 

The movement for a new national government was fairly 
launched. Virginia appointed a group of distinguished dele- 
gates to the convention, with George Washington at their head. 
Other states followed suit, and Congress simply recognized an 
accomplished fact when it resolved that ^'on the second Mon- 
day of May next a convention of delegates shall be held in 
Philadelphia, for the sole purpose of revising the Articles 
of Confederation." 

The student should note the revolutionary character of these 
proceedings. The call of the state legislatures and the resolves 
of self-summoned conventions reminds one of the Committees 
of Safety and of Correspondence in the early Revolutionary 
days. The regular Congress of the United States, its legal 
government, sitting in New York from 1785 to 1789, was not 
the source from which the movement for a new Constitution 
came. That impotent body had tried in vain to get the states 
to grant it powers of taxation and commercial regulation ; and 
now the leaders (Hamilton, Madison, Washington, Jay) turned 
to other ways.^ That many of them were determined to make 
the commercial reforms only the entering wedge for the com- 
plete abolition of the Articles of Confederation we know from 
their correspondence. ^^I consider the convention at Annapolis 
the most important aera in our affairs," wrote Monroe to Madi- 
son; ^'the Eastern men, be assured, mean it as leading further 
than the object [commerce] originally comprehended." Madi- 
son, writing to Jefferson in Paris, August 17, 1786, confesses 
his sympathy with "many Gentlemen both within and without 
Congress" who wished to use the Annapolis meeting to bring 

^Professor Burgess goes so far as to use the phrase coup d'etat (a sudden 
change of government by revolutionary conspiracy) to designate the Annapolis 
meeting. 



138 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



about an amendment of the Articles; but he despairs, in the 
present crisis, of ^'anything beyond a commercial reform." 

The character of the statesmen chosen as delegates to the 
Constitutional Convention, the tone of alarm in the letters of 
the chief men of the period, and the prevalence of public writ- 
ings urging the need for drastic measures, all point to the 
momentous significance of the Philadelphia meeting of 1787. 
The men who assembled in the hall of the statehouse where 
some of them, eleven years earlier, had signed the Declaration 
of Independence^ fully realized the solemnity of the situation. 
"America has certainly upon this occasion drawn forth her 
first characters," wrote George Mason to his son; "the eyes 
of the United States are turned upon this assembly, and their 
expectations raised to a very anxious degree. May God grant 
we may be able to gratify them by establishing a wise and 
just government." 

The moment the Convention had finished its preliminary 
work of organization Governor Randolph of Virginia presented 
fifteen resolutions, designed ostensibly for the correction and 
enlargement of the Articles of Confederation, but in reality 
demanding a new Constitution (May 29). They provided for 
a national legislature of two branches, for a national executive 
to be chosen by the legislature, and for a national judiciary, also 
chosen by the legislature, to hold office during good behavior. 
Most significant of all, they provided for the extension of the 
new authority over the whole Union by the resolution (No. 14) 
that the various officers "within the several states ought to be 
bound by oath to support the articles of union." The Virginia 
resolutions were carried point by point in the first two weeks 
of the debate, and it looked as though a Constitution not 
differing much from the one under which we live might be the 
rapid and peaceful result of the labors of the Convention, until 
the resolution was reached which provided that representation 
in the second branch of the legislature (the Senate) should be 

^ These were Roger Sherman of Connecticut, George Read of Delaware, Benja- 
min Franklin, Robert Morris, George Clymer, and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, 
and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Gerry refused to sign the Constitution. 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 139 



proportioned to population, as in the first branch (the House). 
The smaller states — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Del- 
aware, Maryland — rebelled against this provision and pre- 
sented through Paterson of New Jersey a counter plan ^'for 
revising, correcting, and enlarging the Articles of Confeder- 
ation" without giving up their essential feature, the equality 
of the states. The New Jersey plan approved the creation of 
executive and legislative departments ; it gave Congress powers 
of taxation; it even allowed the central government to call 
on the forces of the confederated states to coerce any recal- 
citrant state or persons in a state into obedience to national 
legislation. But it clung tenaciously to the federal as opposed 
to the national form of government. Congress must still con- 
sist of representatives of the states, not of the people ; and each 
state in Congress must have a single and equal vote. ^^We 
would sooner submit to a foreign power," said John Dickinson 
of Delaware to Madison, ^'than submit to be deprived in both 
branches of the legislature of equality of suffrage, and thereby 
be thrown under the dominion of the larger states." 

This, then, was the crucial question of the Convention : How 
can power be reconciled with liberty ? For the larger states the 
only promise of vigor in the government was in its direct action 
on the people of the land; for the smaller states the only 
guarantee of liberty was in the maintenance of an absolute 
equality of each state in the federal council of the nation. ^'If 
New Jersey will not part with her sovereignty," said James 
Wilson of Pennsylvania, ^4t is vain to talk of government. . . . 
We must forget our local habits and attachments, lay aside 
our state connections, and act for the general good of the 
whole." Ellsworth of Connecticut was immediately on his feet 
in behalf of the small-state men to urge ^'the necessity of main- 
taining the existence and agency of the states," in order to 
preserve a republican government over so large a country. 

It looked as though the Convention would go to pieces over 
this question. Martin of Maryland reported, on June 28, that 
it was on the verge of dissolution, scarce held together by 
the strength of a hair," and Franklin, little inclined to seek 



140 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

divine aid until every human resource had been tried, proposed 
that the sessions should be opened with prayer. The serious- 
ness of the secession of the group of small states on the middle 
Atlantic seaboard, with their invaluable harbor of New York, 
can be seen at a glance. Gunning Bedford of Delaware de- 
clared openly that the small states would turn to foreign powers 
"who were ready to take them by the hand," rather than unite 
on the purely national plan advocated by Morris, King, and 
Wilson. The Convention appointed a committee of thirteen, 
one member from each state, to effect a compromise and ad- 
journed over the Fourth of July. On the next day the com- 
mittee recommended that representation be proportional to 
the population in the House and equal (two members from 
each state) in the Senate. The lower House, as the popular 
body, was to have the exclusive right to initiate revenue bills. 
After ten days of bitter debate this great compromise of the 
Constitution was adopted (July i6) by a vote of five states 
to four. Thus the fundamental character of our government 
was determined — partly national, partly federal. 

Conflicts of interest on the part of sections or of economic 
classes were settled, or at least quieted, by further compromises. 
The slaves, whom the Southerners wished to have counted as 
population, but who, of course, had no political or civil rights, 
were finally reckoned at three fifths of their actual number in 
computing the federal ratio for representation in the House ; so 
that a state which had a population of 200,000 white and 100,000 
blacks would send to Congress representatives for 260,000 
inhabitants. The regulation of commerce, which the agricul- 
tural class wished to have determined by a two-thirds vote in 
Congress, lest excessive taxes be levied under the form of cus- 
toms duties, was left to a simple majority vote, but at the 
same time the producers were favored by a clause forbidding 
Congress to lay duties on exports. On July 26 the Convention 
referred twenty-three resolutions, the practical embodiment of 
the Virginia plan, to a committee of detail, consisting of Rut- 
ledge, Wilson, Ellsworth, Gorham, and Randolph. With the 
resolutions went the New Jersey plan and a plan of Charles 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 141 



Pinckney of South Carolina/ The committee reported two 
weeks later, laying a rough copy of a constitution in ^'broad- 
sides" on the desk of each member. For another month the 
clauses were debated. On September 1 2 the Constitution in its 
present form (save for the amendments) was returned from 
the committee on style, with the evidence of Gouverneur 
Morris's handiwork in its clear and succinct phraseology. On 
the seventeenth the engrossed copy was signed by 39 of the 42 
members present at the Convention and was transmitted to 
Congress to be sent to the states for ratification. 

Opposition to the new Constitution was immediate and 
widespread. The framers, said the critics, were representatives 
of the propertied classes alone and had deliberated like an 
aristocratic assembly behind closed doors. They had gone 
beyond their powers in writing a totally new Constitution in- 
stead of amending the Articles, and they had added presump- 
tion to disobedience by declaring that when nine states ratified 
the Constitution it should go into effect for those states. Was 
not that to invite nine states to ^'secede" from the Union — 
since amendments to the Articles could be adopted only by the 
unanimous consent of the states? Men who had been in the 
forefront of the struggle with Great Britain opposed the new 
Constitution, because they believed that it threatened our 
hard-earned liberty by the powers that it granted to the presi- 
dent and the federal courts. Patrick Henry wrote that he could 

iThe Pinckney plan has been the subject of much controversy. Madison had 
no copy of it, nor was it contained in the meager journals of the Convention 
published in 1818. John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, wrote to Pinckney 
in 1818, asking him for a copy of his plan, and in return received from Pinckney 
a manuscript so like the ''broadside" which had been submitted to the members 
of the Convention by the reporting committee (August 6) that historians have 
been inclined to accuse Pinckney of deliberate forgery. However, the existence 
of a Pinckney plan is undoubted. Many sections occur in the report of August 6 
that were not in the twenty-three resolutions ; and the source of these sections 
was a mystery until Professor J. Franklin Jameson, in 1902, discovered a leaf 
of the Pinckney plan inserted in a manuscript of James Wilson — one of the 
members of the committee. It is likely that Pinckney's plan was used as the 
basis for the "broadside" of August 6, and the disappearance of the manuscript 
may have been due to the fact that it was sent to the printer as "copy." 



142 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



not bring his mind to accord with Washington's letter of in- 
dorsement of the document. Richard Henry Lee wrote the 
Letters from a Federal Farmer" to expose the dangers of 
consolidated power which he saw in the Constitution. He called 
the proposed government ^'an elective despotism." Benjamin 
Harrison, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, saw 
only ^Hhe seeds of discord" in the unlimited powers of tax- 
ation, the regulation of trade, and the jurisdictions that are 
to be established in every state altogether independent of their 
laws." He thought that ^'the states south of the Potomac 
would be little more than appendages to those north of it" if 
Congress by a bare majority could control commerce and 
taxation at will. Scrupulous democrats demanded a Bill of 
Rights guaranteeing freedom of speech and press, religious 
liberty, the right of petition, and trial by jury. Jealous states'^ 
rights men saw in the Constitution a threat of absorption by 
the central government; since the members of Congress, paid 
from the national Treasury, would be absolved of responsibility 
to their state, and their oath of allegiance to the federal govern- 
ment would nullify their allegiance to their sovereign state. 

In the face of this varied and determined opposition the 
campaign for ratification was waged. The defense of the 
Constitution in the ratifying conventions called by the legis- 
latures of the states fell chiefy on the shoulders of a few men 
who had been members of the Constitutional Convention — 
Wilson and the IMorrises in Pennsylvania, Sherman and Ells- 
worth in Connecticut, King and Strong in INIassachusetts, 
Rutledge and the Pinckneys in South Carolina, Madison in 
Virginia, and Hamilton in New York. Washington, though 
not in the Virginia ratifying convention, was the most influen- 
tial man in the country in securing the adoption of the Consti- 
tution. His prestige was enormous and his efforts were untiring. 
He won over Governor Randolph, who had refused to sign the 
Constitution at Philadelphia. Mr. Donald, who visited Wash- 
ington at Mount Vernon in the summer of 1788, wrote, ^'I 
never in my life sav/ him so keen for anything as he is for 
the adoption of the new Constitution." Even the closeness of 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 143 



the vote on ratification (187 to 168 in Massachusetts, 89 to 79 
in Virginia, 30 to 27 in New York) can give no idea of the 
strenuousness of the campaign — a campaign fought with all 
the characteristic weapons of eighteenth-century political con- 
troversy: personal vituperation, venomous pamphlets, turgid 
oratory, hangings and burnings in effigy, billingsgate, bonfires, 
barbecues, and bad verses. 

Out of the mass of ephemeral literature, however, there 
emerged one work of lasting worth. Alexander Hamilton, in 
his fight for ratification in New York, invited Madison and 
Jay to collaborate with him in a series of articles explaining 
the need, the nature, and the anticipated operation of the new 
Constitution. The articles appeared in the winter and spring of 
1 787-1 788 in various New York papers, over the signature 
of ^Tublius." Jay wrote five of them, explaining the function 
of the proposed Constitution in foreign relations. Madison's 
twenty-nine papers dealt chiefly with the nature of the double 
government of state and nation, with the relation of the execu- 
tive, legislative, and judicial departments to one another, and 
the fortunes of federal systems in the world's history. Hamil- 
ton contributed fifty-one papers, emphasizing our dire need 
for a worthy and respected central government, the security to 
all interests, foreign and domestic, which would result from the 
application of just laws impartially enforced, and the benefits 
to our trade and our Treasury which would inure from the new 
Constitution. The articles, gathered into a volume under the 
title of "The Federalist," have been considered the ablest expo- 
sition of the principles underlying our Constitution, and one of 
the ablest works of political science in the world's literature. 

Submitted to a general popular vote, the Constitution would 
probably have been defeated. Its supporters, the propertied 
classes, were far outnumbered by the disfranchised farmers and 
the industrial workers in the cities. Even among the voting 
population itself the opposition was so strong that only the 
specter of disunion could overcome it.^ However, by the end 

iSo John Marshall, an ardent supporter of the Constitution in the Virginia 
ratifying convention, testifies in his "Life of Washington" (Vol. II, p. 127). 



144 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



of June, 1788, nine state conventions had ratified the docu- 
ment, and the Constitution went into effect for those states. 
Only North Carolina and Rhode Island refused to join the new 
government before the inauguration, the following April, of its 
first president, George Washington. 

When we analyze the motives for calling the Constitutional 
Convention, the method of election of the members, and the 
printed records of the debates, it is impossible to resist the con- 
clusion that the Constitution was framed primarily to guarantee 
the interests of property against the dangers of anarchy, re- 
pudiation, and bankruptcy.^ Washington confessed that we 
might as well continue under the old Confederation if the 
new instrument failed ^^to do justice to the public creditors and 
retrieve the national character." So aristocratic, indeed, did the 
new Constitution appear to many, with its life tenure for judges, 
its small and powerful Senate, its executive unhampered by a 
responsible cabinet or council, its complete control of commerce 
and currency, its machinery for the prompt suppression of 
popular disaffection, that it seemed rather an instrument for re- 
straining than for expressing the popular will. "Its advocates," 
wrote John Adams, "received the active and steady cooper- 
ation of all that was left in America of attachment to the 
mother country, as well as of the moneyed interest, which 
ever points to strong government as surely as the needle 
to the pole." Mellen Chamberlain calls the Constitution "the 
triumph of the legitimate successors of the anti-Revolutionary 
party of 1775." 

However, all discontent seemed to vanish in the general 
rejoicing which attended the final ratification of the Consti- 
tution. The "federal roof " was up at last. Pageants and pro- 
cessions, feasting and oratory, were the order of the day. 
Allegory was called in to supplement sober statement. "The 
good ship Constitution^^ was safe in port. "The sloop Anarchy 

iThis was the view of John Adams and many other "aristocratically minded" 
men at the time, and a view that has been developed by some modem scholars, 
notably by Professor Charles A. Beard in his "Economic Interpretation of the 
Constitution" (1914). 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 145 



had "gone ashore on the Union rock," and "the old scow 
Confederacy, ImbeciHty master," had "gone off to sea." But 
opposition only slumbered a little while to waken again, as 
we shall see, in Washington's administration, against the 
"monocrats" and the "Anglophiles," the merchants and the 
bondholders, who were accused of degrading the government 
from the servant of the whole people to the slave of the 
moneyed classes. 

The Constitution is brief, clear, and simple. Its unique 
virtue from the point of view of political science is the device 
by which it secured the supremacy of the new federal govern- 
ment without destroying or absorbing the state governments. 
Under the Confederation a state could ignore or defy the meas- 
ures of Congress with impunity. A remedy for this chronic nul- 
lification of national laws was a prime requisite in a new 
constitution. Various remedies were proposed: to have the 
governor of each state appointed under the authority of the 
United States; to give the national executive the right to veto 
state laws "under regulations prescribed by the United States" ; 
to give Congress the right to coerce a disobedient state. But 
instead of interfering directly with the officers or the laws of the 
states, or coercing a state by force of arms (which, as Madison 
urged, "would look more like a declaration of war than an in- 
fliction of punishment"), the Convention devised the happy 
expedient of enlisting the state authorities themselves in the 
support of the national government. The members of state 
legislatures and all the executive and judicial officers of a state 
were bound by oath to support the Constitution of the United 
States (Art. VI, sect. 3), and the state courts were pledged to 
recognize the Constitution and the laws and treaties made under 
it as "the supreme law of the land, . . . anything in the Consti- 
tution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding" 
(Art. VI, sect. 2). No defiance was hurled at the states; no 
direct orders were given to them ; only a few prohibitions were 
enjoined upon them; and no threat of military punishment was 
held over them. Still, the citizens of every state were brought 
individually and severally under the authority of the United 



146 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



States through the federal courts; and the laws of any state 
might be set aside at any time as unconstitutional by a decision 
of the Supreme Court, which was the final court of appeal in all 
cases involving the interpretation of the Constitution (Art. Ill, 
sects. I, 2). 

Because the guardian of our American system of government 
has been the federal judiciary, rather than the military arm or 
an executive with the power of issuing administrative decrees, 
the courts have often been attacked in America as the strong- 
holds of conservatism, and ^'judge-made law" has been branded 
as a usurpation of the rights of the popularly elected legislatures. 
Undoubtedly, the danger of some admixture of politics in our 
theoretically independent judiciary is the price we have to pay 
for the maintenance of the law of the land ; but it is a small 
price, after all, to pay for freedom from subjection to a military 
police or to an arrogant group of minister-courtiers around a 
king by divine right. It is hard to imagine any agency or power 
that could have more justly performed the difficult task of 
adapting the Constitution to the various needs of a rapidly 
growing democracy than the federal judiciary, secured as it is 
by appointment and tenure from the undue influence of tempo- 
rary or local legislation and yet truly national in character from 
its diffusion through all the states of the Union. 

Many extraconstitutional features have developed in the 
actual application of the Constitution. A stranger reading the 
document would be well informed on such formal matters 
as the qualifications of officers, the powers of Congress, the proc- 
ess of amendment; but of the actual forces which move the 
government in state and nation he would be ignorant. He would 
find nothing in the Constitution about political parties, con- 
ventions, platforms, and machines." He would have no sus- 
picion of the immense power of the Senate through its control 
of patronage. He would not know what departments make 
up the president's cabinet or how many members there are in 
the Supreme Court. He would know nothing of the complicated 
process by which hundreds of bills become laws in every session 
of Congress. He would think that our president is still selected 



FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 147 



by a little group of electors" meeting quietly in their respec- 
tive states and balloting for a man of their own choice. 

Although March 4, 1789, was the day set by the expiring 
Congress of the Confederation for the inauguration of the new 
government, it was well into April before the arrival of a 
majority of Congress in New York enabled the Houses to 
organize and count the electoral vote. George Washington's 
name was written first on every one of the sixty-nine ballots. 
The next highest vote (34) was for John Adams, who was de- 
clared vice president. On April 30 Washington took the oath 
of office on the balcony of Federal Hall, New York, while the 
great throng that filled the street below shouted, ^'God bless 
our Washington! Long live our beloved President!" The 
event marked the end of an era. That same April day fifteen 
years before, the British Parliament had been deliberating the 
first set of measures framed for the coercion and punishment of 
the recalcitrant American colonies. The victory of the men of 
1 775 in the war insured us a free field to work out the experiment 
of American democracy ; the victory of the men of 1 787 in peace 
secured a government strong enough to preserve that democracy 
from degeneration into factional groups despised in the eyes of 
Europe and distracted by petty rivalries at home. The burden of 
responsibility borne by the leaders who had labored for victory 
in war and order in peace during this critical decade and a half 
had been heavy. Their letters are filled with a courageous 
anxiety which bears witness to the strain they had been under. 
The adoption of the Constitution filled them with a kind of aw- 
ful misgiving, for they knew at what a price they had won the 
opportunity to prove their faith in their political destiny. It 
is no wonder that the man who had borne the greatest burden 
of responsibility in both war and peace spoke in a voice ^'a 
little tremulous'' in his inaugural address to the members of 
the first Congress of the United States under the Constitution : 
"The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny 
of the republican model of government are justly considered 
as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment intrusted 
to the hands of the American People." 



CHAPTER IV 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 

The establishment of a republican government on a safe and solid basis is 
the wish of every honest man in the United States, and is an object of all others 
the nearest and most dear to my own heart. — Alexander Hamilton 

The Hamiltonian System 

Six days before the electors met in their ten^ respective states 
to cast a unanimous vote for George Washington as first presi- 
dent of the United States, the man thus honored had written to 
General Pinckney, ^'For my own part, I am entirely per- 
suaded that the present general government will endeavor to 
lay the foundations for its proceedings in national justice, faith, 
and honor." Called himself a few weeks later to take the oath 
of office as chief magistrate of the new general government," 
he fulfilled this prophetic pledge with the utmost fidelity. 
Justice, faith, and honor were the ideals which inspired George 
Washington his life long, and firmness, diligence, and the long 
patience which is akin to genius were the qualities of character 
which those ideals produced. Far less creative than Hamilton 
and far less learned than Jefferson, without Franklin's wit or 
Henry's eloquence, Washington was still the acknowledged 
master of them all in the superb balance of deed and thought, 
of reason and action, with which he pursued his even way in 
all vicissitudes of fortune. Most men as courageous would 
have been precipitate in action ; most men as deliberate would 
have been vacillating in counsel. But Washington was equally 
removed from exaltation and despair. ^'Of all the great men 
in history," says Lecky, ^'he was the most invariably judicious." 

^North Carolina did not enter the Union until November, 1789, and Rhode 
Island until the following May. In New York a deadlock between the senate 
and the assembly prevented the choice of presidential electors in 1789. 

148 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



149 



His ambitions were all weighted with a sense of the responsibil- 
ities which they brought^ and his labors lightened by the quiet, 
constant faith that they were contributing to the eventual 
success of the newly founded democracy, ^Hhe last great experi- 
ment for promoting human happiness by a reasonable compact 
in civil society." His aims were all his country's/ 

When Washington read his inaugural speech before the 
members of the first Congress in Federal Hall, New York, the 
total government of the United States was represented there. 
The departments, jurisdictions, courts, and embassies which 
were necessary for the execution of the powers conferred on the 
president and Congress by the Constitution had to be created 
by law and manned by secretaries, judges, marshals, collectors 
of customs, postmasters, military officers, territorial governors, 
Indian commissioners, foreign ministers and consuls, and a host 
of minor officials and clerks. The dissolution of the old Con- 
gress had put an end to all its feeble organs of government. 
The requisitions on the states ceased, leaving the new govern- 
ment without a penny of income. The only bequest from the 
Confederation was a debt, which the new Constitution assumed 
in full. 

The most imperative need of the new government was a 
revenue; and on the very day after the first Congress was 
organized, without waiting even for the inauguration of the 
president, the House of Representatives proceeded to the dis- 
cussion of a tariff. James Madison of Virginia, the leading 
member of the House, brought in a bill imposing moderate 
duties (averaging about 8 per cent) on sugar, molasses, tea, 
coffee, wine, salt, glass, nails, and other imports. Although the 
bill was described in the preamble as ^^An Act for the en- 
couragement and protection of Manufactures," the protective 

iThe finest delineation of Washington's character in brief compass is a letter 
written by Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Walter Jones in January, 1814. It is the 
more remarkable as the tribute of a man whose political tenets were opposed 
to Washington's and whose personal relations during the later years of Wash- 
ington's life were not the most cordial. The letter may be found in H. S. Ran- 
dall's "Life of Thomas Jefferson," Vol. Ill, p. 641, or in P. L. Ford's edition of 
"Writings of Jefferson," Vol. IX, p. 446. 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



elements in it were only slight. It was the need of revenue which 
Madison urged in his speech, to meet our financial obligations 
and to revive among us ^'the dormant principles of our honor 
and honesty." There was no recourse in the debate on the 
bill to the stock arguments of the protectionist: high wages 
and the American standard of living. But one kind of protec- 
tion the bill effected immediately. Importers of large consign- 
ments of goods from Europe secured the postponement of the 
operation of the act until their cargoes should have landed, and 
at the same time put up the prices of the goods to accord with 
the tariff. The consumers paid the bill. In spite of the recom- 
mendations of our first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander 
Hamilton, for a high protective duty, in his Report on Manu- 
factures, of December, 1791, the tariff remained low until the 
need of extraordinary revenue for war raised it to protective 
levels. 

The three executive departments of State (foreign affairs), 
Treasury, and War were organized in the summer months of 
1789, and Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Henry 
Knox were appointed as the respective incumbents. Edmund 
Randolph of Virginia was named Attorney-General and took 
part with the executive secretaries in the cabinet meetings, 
though the Department of Justice was not organized by Con- 
gress until 1870. The heads of departments did not form a 
"cabinet" in the true sense of the word. They were not, like 
European ministries, an executive committee, drawn from the 
legislature, and responsible to the legislature in the shaping of 
national policy, nor were they recognized in any corporate 
capacity by Congress or the Constitution. The president, ac- 
cording to the Constitution, might "require their opinion in 
writing . . . upon any subject relating to the duties of their 
respective offices," but he was not obliged to consult them in 
a body. Washington did often ask opinions of his secretaries 
privately and separately, but under Jefferson the habit became 
fixed of assembling the cabinet at stated times for joint deliber- 
ation and advice on the policies of the administration. It was 
not until the middle of President Roosevelt's second term 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



(1907) that the cabinet received official recognition as a part 
of our constitutional machinery. 

A J udiciary Act, prepared mainly by Oliver Ellsworth of Con- 
necticut and passed September 24, 1789, organized the Supreme 
Court and erected federal district and circuit courts. Washing- 
ton designated John Jay of New York as Chief Justice of the 
Supreme Court and named among the five associate justices 
such distinguished men as James Wilson of Pennsylvania, John 
Rutledge of South Carolina, and James Blair of Virginia. In 
accordance with the clause of the Constitution (Art. Ill, sect. 2, 
par. 2) which gives Congress power to regulate the appellate 
jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, the Judiciary Act conferred 
on the court the enormous power of reviewing the decisions 
of state courts as to the constitutionality of statutes — a power 
which Senator Maclay declared was designed ''to swallow by 
degrees all the state judiciaries." From this famous twenty- 
fifth clause of the Judiciary Act has been developed the practice 
of the Supreme Court (the ''guardian of the Constitution") in 
declaring null and void acts of the state legislatures and Con- 
gress which conflict with the Constitution. The review of state 
laws and decisions by the Supreme Court led to many contro- 
versies, in our earlier history especially, between the advocates 
of states' rights and the champions of national sovereignty. 

A multitude of minor matters were adjusted in the busy 
summer session of the first Congress. Hundreds of offices were 
created in connection with the great departments. The salaries 
of congressmen and executive officials were fixed. The location 
of the new capital was discussed. The president (but only by 
the casting vote of Vice President Adams in the Senate) was 
given the power to remove heads of departments and other ap- 
pointive officers at his own discretion. The hundred and more 
amendments to the Constitution suggested by the states in their 
ratifying conventions were boiled down to twelve and passed 
by Congress. Ten of these twelve were ratified by the necessary 
three fourths of the states and appear as the first ten amend- 
ments of our Constitution. On September 29, 1789, Congress 
adjourned until the following January. 



152 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Quite as important as formal acts of Congress in determining 
the character of our government were a number of precedents 
established in the opening days of our national history. The 
French minister, the count of Moustier, tried to get Washing- 
ton's ear for a private audience, but the president with firm 
and kindly tact held the minister to the custom of civilized 
nations of communicating their business in writing and through 
the proper channel of the foreign office. Congress too asserted 
its independence of the executive. Jealous of its constitutional 
right of initiating revenue measures, the House limited the 
Secretary of the Treasury to the preparation of reports to be 
presented for its consideration. It refused to allow Hamilton 
to appear on the floor in person to recommend his measures, 
since he was not a member of Congress nor amenable to its 
control except through the extreme and unusual process of 
impeachment. Hamilton's friends, who wanted to see him play 
the part of an English Chancellor of the Exchequer, were not 
a little nettled at this democratic opposition. Even Washing- 
ton's presence at the side of Secretary Knox in the Senate, 
where they had come to explain an Indian treaty, failed to 
secure a favorable reception for the Secretary of War. Both 
Washington and Knox withdrew from the Senate chamber in 
considerable embarrassment. A few years later Fisher Ames 
complained that the heads of administrative departments, in- 
stead of forming a real ministry^ which might ^'impart a kind 
of momentum to the operation of the laws," were only chief 
clerks." Whether it was wiser or not for Congress to keep the 
executive officers at arm's length is a question on which critics 
differ. It is the feature which differentiates our constitutional 
system most sharply from those of the responsible governments 
of Europe. 

Congress assembled for its second session on January 4, 1790. 
Ten days later it listened to Alexander Hamilton's First Report 
on the Public Credit. Hamilton was a financial genius of the 
first order, endowed with ^'a powerful imagination for facts." 
To the capacity for sustained and close thinking inherited from 
his Scotch father he added his French mother's vivacity, 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



153 



amiability, and charm. He had come to New York at the age of 
fifteen from his birthplace in the British West Indian island 
of Nevis to enter King's College (Columbia), and forthwith 
he devoted his precocious talents as a writer and speaker to the 
cause of the American colonies, which was then rapidly moving 
to its crisis. His services in the field and the council chamber 
during the American Revolution were considerable. In the 
later years of the war and during the critical period that 
followed he was assiduous in the study of finance and tireless 
in the recommendation of measures to strengthen the govern- 
ment and revive its languishing credit. In 1780, at the age of 
twenty-three, he wrote a long letter to our leading financier, 
Robert Morris, on the need for the establishment of a national 
bank. In the same year, in a remarkable letter to James 
Duane, he analyzed the causes of the weakness of the Con- 
federation and proposed as a remedy a scheme of national 
government in which many of the features of the Constitution 
of 1787 were anticipated. He was chairman of a committee 
of Congress to report on an impost duty in 1782, and a few 
years later in the legislature of New York he fought valiantly 
to persuade the state to surrender to the Union sources of 
revenue sufficient to enable it to discharge its obligations. ^'For 
how," said he, ^'can our national character be preserved with- 
out paying our debts, or our Union continue to exist without 
revenues?" It was as no tyro in finance, then, but as a master 
that the young Secretary of the Treasury came forward in 
January, 1 790, with his program for the establishment of our 
national credit. 

"There is probably," says Henry Cabot Lodge, "no single 
state paper in the history of the United States, with the excep- 
tion of the Emancipation Proclamation, which was of such 
immense importance and produced such wide and far-reaching 
results as Hamilton's First Report on the PubHc Credit." 
The long document^ may be divided into two main parts: 

iThe Report is printed in full in H. C. Lodge's Federal edition of the "Works 
of Alexander Hamilton," Vol. II, pp. 227-289. 



154 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



What are the obHgations of the United States ? and How shall 
those obligations be met? In dealing with the first question 
the Secretary showed the grandeur and courage of his convic- 
tions, and in dealing with the second he showed the resourceful- 
ness and ingenuity of his imagination. We owed $11,710,378 
to foreign creditors. Nobody doubted that this part of our 
debt ought to be provided for according to the precise terms 
of the contracts relating to it." The domestic debt, with arrears 
of interest equal to half the principal, amounted to $40,414,085. 
The interest-bearing certificates representing this part of the 
debt had so depreciated in value, as the embarrassments of the 
government thickened, that they sold on the speculative market 
of 1 789 for only a quarter of their face value. Hamilton insisted 
that the Treasury redeem these certificates at their full value. 
The United States had pledged itself to pay the amount written 
on the note and must pay that amount to the penny, no matter 
who held the note. If this enriched the speculator who had 
bought the certificates for 25 per cent of their par value, that 
was the punishment of the original holders who had had so little 
faith in their government as to sell its securities cheap. They 
must learn once for all that the new government of the United 
States would not start out with a policy of repudiation. The 
Constitution (Art. VI, sect, i) declared that ^'all debts con- 
tracted and engagements entered into" before its adoption 
should be as ''valid against the United States under this Consti- 
tution as under the Confederation." Congress was forbidden, 
then, by the fundamental law of the land to pay less than the 
full value of its debt. As for the plan, urged by Madison and 
others, that the government pay the present holders what the 
certificates had cost them plus the accrued interest from the 
date of purchase, and pay the balance to the original holders, 
Hamilton found it impoHtic and ''replete with absurd as well 
as inequitable consequences." Even if the original holders 
could be traced, how could it be proved whether they had actu- 
ally profited or lost by realizing a certain amount on their 
securities at a certain time. Perhaps the money was worth 
more to them then than the full value of the certificates would 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



155 



be now. In short, the matter was so complicated that the 
government could never hope to adjust it equitably. With 
buyers and sellers in the security market it could not pretend 
to deal. All it could or should do was to pay its debt as pledged. 
But this policy seemed to Hamilton's opponents to put a pre- 
mium on speculation in the public funds, to make the Treasury 
the ally of the capitalist, and still further to enrich, at public 
expense, the rich man who had taken advantage of the need of 
the poor to filch away" their substance for a pittance. 

The next proposition of the Secretary was even more start- 
ling. Owing to the inability of the old Congress to command 
the resources of the country through taxation, the several states 
had been obliged to incur debts during the Revolution for 
the defense of their territory. These debts, amounting to 
$18,271,786, Hamilton proposed should be ^'assumed by the 
Union" on the grounds of sound policy and substantial 
justice." The justice of the policy of assumption lay in the fact 
that the debts had been incurred by the states for the common 
cause of the Union ; the sound policy of the measure was con- 
tained in the assurance that ^^if the public creditors receive 
their dues from one source, distributed with an equal hand, . . . 
they will unite in the fiscal arrangements of the government." 
If the states retained their debts they would have to compete 
with the central government in raising large annual revenues. 
This would lead to mutual jealousy and opposition" and seem 
to put a double burden of taxation on the people. Moreover, 
the Constitution having taken from the states the most abun- 
dant source of revenue in the tariff duties (Art. I, sect. 10, 
par. 2), it was only fair that the general government should 
relieve them from the burden of their debt. 

In the second half of his Report Hamilton set forth his plan 
for meeting the debt. Annual interest charges at the current 
rates of 4^ and 5 per cent on the foreign debt and 6 per cent on 
the domestic debt would amount to $4,587,444. This amount 
Hamilton reduced to $2,239,163 by his funding operations, a 
complicated set of measures based on the expectation that 
within five years the credit of the United States would enable 



156 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



it to borrow at 5 per cent and within twenty years at 4 per cent. 
The holders of the old loan certificates could exchange them at 
the Treasury for various options, including annuities, grants of 
public land, bonds bearing interest from date, and deferred 
stock" paying interest after the year 1800. For meeting the 
current expenses of the government and interest on the debt 
Hamilton proposed to add to the existing duties on imports and 
tonnage additional taxes on wines, liquors, tea, and coffee which 
would yield over $1,500,000. In closing he urged upon the 
House the great importance of making provision to meet our 
obligations without delay, in order ^'to give a better impression 
of the good faith of the country, to bring earlier relief to the 
creditors, and to prevent the further depreciation of the gov- 
ernment stock through speculation," by which ^'milhons would 
probably be lost to the United States." 

The contest in the House over Hamilton's Report was a bitter 
one, centering chiefly in the project for the assumption of the 
state debts. States with heavy obHgations (Massachusetts, 
South Carolina, Connecticut) naturally favored assumption, 
while those which either had never contracted a large debt or 
had succeeded in paying off most of their debt (New Hampshire, 
Maryland, Georgia, Virginia) were against the measure. The 
Secretary's solicitude for the relief of the states, said his oppo- 
nents, was only a hypocritical pretext to cover his real purpose ; 
namely, the addition of another $20,000,000 to the already in- 
flated debt of $54,000,000, to make doubly sure the perpet- 
ual alliance of the federal government with the men of wealth 
who would absorb its enormous issues of securities. And, in- 
deed, Hamilton had put himself on record again and again as 
an advocate of such an alliance. ^^The only plan," he wrote to 
Robert Morris in 1780, ^^that can preserve the country is one 
that will make it the immediate interest of the moneyed men to 
cooperate with the government in its support." And again, in 
the famous letter of the same year to Duane: ^^The only 
certain manner to obtain a permanent paper credit is to en- 
gage the moneyed interests immediately on it, by making them 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



157 



contribute the whole or part of the stock and giving them the 
whole or part of the profits." Furthermore, Hamilton wished 
the debt to be perpetual, since he would allow Congress to 
redeem but 2 per cent of it in any year. A perpetual debt 
meant a perpetual control of the government by the capitalists. 
It was the introduction of the British system of finance. 

The assumption measure seemed lost when the North 
Carolina delegates, who arrived on the floor of Congress in 
April, 1790, cast their votes against it. But Hamilton, always 
fertile in resource, found a way out. Thomas Jefferson had 
lately arrived in New York to take up his duties as Secretary 
of State. Hamilton waylaid him one morning on the way to an 
interview with Washington, and walked him backwards and 
forwards before the president's door for a half an hour," pathet- 
ically painting the temper into which the legislature had been 
wrought, the disgust of those who were called the creditor states, 
and the danger of the secession of their members and the sepa- 
ration of the states." Jefferson, flattered at being sought as an 
arbiter on the threshold of his cabinet career, invited Hamilton 
and a few influential friends to dinner, and a bargain was struck 
over the wine, by which the Secretary of State agreed to secure 
some Southern votes for assumption in return for Hamilton's 
influence in getting the national capital established on the banks 
of the Potomac. Jefferson realized later, to his horror, that he 
had contributed to the policy of fixing the octopus" of the 
money power on the government, and complained that he had 
been duped" by Hamilton before he had had time to grasp the 
importance of the measure. But as Jefferson had been in the 
country since the preceding Christmas and was an exceptionally 
close student of political affairs, it seems as though he might 
have divined the purport of the assumption bill before the end 
of May. On July 26, 1790, assumption was carried through 
the House by a vote of 32 to 29, and the end of the summer 
saw the realization of the whole program of Hamilton's Report. 
It was perhaps the most fateful legislation in our history until 
the middle of the nineteenth century. 



158 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Three other important reports to Congress complete the 
Hamiltonian system. On December 13, 1790, a second Report 
on the Public Credit was submitted, which discussed means of 
increasing the revenue and recommended an elaborate system 
of excise duties on wines and spirits. At the same time the 
famous report advocating the establishment of a National 
Bank was presented. At the opening of the second Congress 
(December, 1791) a Report on Manufactures was sent in, rec- 
ommending a protective tariff. The Report on Manufactures 
was not adopted, but the excise and the Bank were put through 
Congress.^ 

A National Bank in some shape or other, which should unite 
private and public funds ^Ho erect a mass of credit that would 
supply the defect of moneyed capital and answer all the pur- 
poses of cash," had been for a decade a project of Hamilton's. 
The Bank, he urged, would effect the augmentation of active 
capital in a country in which such capital was needed for the 
development of the land and the encouragement of manu- 
factures. It would mean the extension of credit and would 
facilitate the payment of taxes by increasing the currency, for 
its bills and notes would circulate as cash. It would stimulate 
business. It would act as a kind of central exchange office for 
investment opportunities, keeping in constant circulation capi- 
tal which private individuals would be likely to hold in their 
strong-boxes for lack of a timely offer of investment or of a 
thorough confidence in the stability of the currency. It would 
furnish the government with a convenient fiscal agent for the 
negotiation of loans, the payment of the interest on the public 
debt, and the deposit of the Treasury balances. Hamilton pro- 
posed that the Bank should be incorporated by Congress for a 
period of twenty years with a capital of $10,000,000. Its shares 
of $400 each should be offered for public subscription, one 
fourth being paid for in specie (gold or silver) and three fourths 

1 Subsidiary measures of the Hamiltonian system were the creation of a sink- 
ing fund and the establishment of a mint. Hamilton wanted to have the Presi- 
dent's head stamped on the coins of the United States; but the House thought 
that this smacked too much of royalty, and substituted the figure of Liberty. 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



159 



in the stock of the public debt bearing interest at 6 per cent. Its 
bills and notes were to be receivable for all dues to the United 
States. The government might subscribe for one fifth of the 
stock ($2,000,000) and borrow the money back from the Bank 
forthwith. The Bank was to have a monopoly in transacting 
the government's financial business, but was forbidden to buy 
any of the public debt in the market; that is, to speculate 
in government securities. The Treasury Department was to 
have the right to inspect the Bank's accounts and to demand 
reports as often as once a week on the amount of its stock out- 
standing, its debts, deposits, notes in circulation, and cash 
in hand. 

The Bank bill was passed in February, 1791, and sent to the 
President for his signature. Washington^ as was his custom in 
weighty matters, asked for written opinions on the bill from 
the members of his cabinet. Both Randolph and Jefferson 
advised the President to veto it. The Attorney-General raised 
the objection that the Constitution did not give Congress the 
power to create corporations; and Jefferson, with his innate 
jealousy of the extension of the authority of the central govern- 
ment, argued further that the Bank was neither necessary" 
nor proper" for carrying out the powers granted to Congress. 
Once depart from the strict letter of the Constitution, and a 
clear road to despotism would be opened. Washington sent the 
opinions of Randolph and Jefferson to Hamilton in confidence, 
with the request for a speedy reply. In an elaborate argument, 
submitted to the President on February 23, 1791, Hamilton 
answered the objections of his colleagues in the cabinet, insist- 
ing on the sovereignty of the national government and showing 
how the Bank would be both a necessary and a proper agency 
in such important federal duties as the laying and collecting of 
taxes, the borrowing of money, the regulation of currency and 
trade, and the national defense. His arguments prevailed, and 
Washington signed the bill. Hamilton's opinion on the Bank 
was a momentous document, for it was the first exposition of 
the ^^mplied powers" of Congress, deducible from the general 
tenor and purport of the Constitution, — the first tentative 



i6o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



stretching of the '^elastic clause" (Art. I, sect. 8, par. i8) which 
has been kept pretty taut ever since.^ 

Historians have been quite unanimous in attributing to 
Hamilton's financial measures the establishment of the public 
credit of the United States. Daniel Webster's tribute to the 
first Secretary of the Treasury has become classic: ^'He smote 
the rock of national resources and abundant streams of revenue 
gushed forth ; he touched the dead corpse of public credit and 
it sprang upon its feet." Certain it is that the growth of our 
economic prosperity was rapid in the years following the 
adoption of the Hamiltonian system. Our exports increased to 
$2 0,000,000 a year. Our shipping extended literally around 
the world.- The total Bank stock was taken up within two 
hours after the subscription books were opened, and in a few 
months it was selHng at a premium of 40 per cent. Foreign 
capital sought investment in America, while the European wars 
kindled by the French Revolution stimulated our manufactures 
and commerce.^ At the same time, there is evidence enough 
that our general economic fortunes were on the rise before 
Hamilton's measures went into effect. European exports to 
the United States increased from 89,400,000 in 1788 to 812, 
600,000 in 1789 and $17,100,000 in 1790. Hamilton himself 

^In 18 1 9 the famous case of McCulIoch vs. Maryland tested the constitution- 
ality of the Bank before the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Marshall's decision 
completely upheld the legislation of 179 1. It is interesting to see how closely 
the reasoning of Marshall (United States Reports, 4 Wheat. 316 ff.) follows 
Hamilton's cabinet opinion (Works (Federal edition), Vol. Ill, pp. 445-493). 
Though the first Bank failed of recharter by a single vote in both Houses of 
Congress in 181 1, and the second Bank was overthrown by the election of 1832, 
the most important features of Hamilton's scheme — a banking-system under the 
supervision of the government, and a national currency — were revived in the 
stress of the Civil War and have remained a part of our policy ever since. 

2 On August 10, 1790, Captain Gray, in the ship Columbia, arrived in Boston 
Harbor with a cargo of tea from China, after carrying the American flag for the 
first time around the world. On his next voyage, to repeat the exploit, Gray 
discovered the great river on our western coast and named it after his ship 
(1792). This discovery constituted one of our strongest claims to the vast 
Oregon region in later years. 

3 European investors held 17,000 of the 25,000 shares of the stock when the 
Bank was disestablished in 1811. 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



i6i 



spoke, in his Report on Manufactures, of the ^'many factories 
of leather, iron, copper, flax, fur, wool, brick, soap, carriages, 
etc." as ^'having attained to a considerable degree of maturity." 
Washington believed that we were on the up-grade in 1788. 
He wrote to Jefferson in Paris, on August 3 1 of that year, that 
the American people were emerging from the gulf of dissipa- 
tion and debt into which they had precipitated themselves at 
the close of the war," and that economy and industry were 
evidently gaining ground." To Lafayette he had written a 
few weeks earlier, ^^I really believe that there never was so 
much labor and economy to be found in the country as at the 
present moment" ; and he predicted that when the new govern- 
ment should go into effect many blessings would be attributed to 
it which were already taking their rise from industry and 
frugality." Hamilton was able to take advantage of this turn 
in the tide of prosperity.^ 

But whether Hamilton's measures inaugurated our prosper- 
ity or only hastened its march, they divided the country at large, 
as they did the cabinet, into two irreconcilable parties and fur- 
nished the program for a concerted opposition to the admin- 
istration of Washington. Not that they created either the 
economic conditions or the social disposition out of which the 
parties came. Otto, the secretary of the French legation at 
New York, wrote home to Vergennes in October, 1786, Al- 
though there are no nobles in America, there is a class of men, 
denominated gentlemen, who by reason of their wealth, their 
talents, and their education, their families or the offices which 
they hold, aspire to a preeminence which the common people 

i"The Constitution was floated on a wave of commercial prosperity" (Far- 
rand, "The Development of the United States," p. 75). G. S. Callender remarks 
in his "Economic History of the United States" (p. 182), "One may well 
wonder what would have been the fate of Hamilton's brilliant projects ... if 
they had been tried on the country during the economic gloom of 1 785-1 786." 
A curious testimony to reviving prosperity is found in a squib in the Pennsyl- 
vania Packet of July 4, 1788, reporting the ratification of the Constitution: 
" Ship news extra ! Arrived safely in port the Ship Federal Constitution, Per- 
petual Union commander. In her came passengers Flourishing Commerce, Pub- 
lic Faith, Confidence, Justice." 



l62 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



refuses to grant them . . . and moreover, they are creditors, 
and therefore interested in strengthening the government and 
watching over the execution of the laws." Hamilton himself, in 
the speech in which he recommended to the convention at 
Philadelphia his plan for an aristocratic" constitution, said: 
^^All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. 
The few are the rich and well born, the other, the mass of the 
populace. . . . The people are turbulent and changing; they 
seldom judge or determine right. Give, therefore, to the first 
class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They 
will check the boisterousness of the second." It was this first 
class" — the solid men of wealth, birth, and position, the large 
merchants, manufacturers, and capitalists, the holders of the 
public securities, the clergy and the lawyers, the advocates of 
energy and full competency in the national government — who 
rallied to the support of Hamilton's program. They were 
called Federalists. They were a small minority of the total 
population, but common interests bound them into a com- 
pact, alert body. They had the offices of the government in 
their hands. 

On the other side were the mass of the people — the debt- 
burdened farmers of the interior counties; the manufacturers 
and apprentices, spinning, carding, and weaving their wool, 
hammering out their iron nails, bending over their lapstones 
to shape the rude leather soles; the hardy pioneers who ever 
since the war had been crossing the mountains into the rich 
valleys of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee. These 
people had little need for a strong central government. They 
had fought for their liberty and wished now to enjoy it. They 
had no capital to worry about and were little concerned with 
the credit of the United States. They had no money to spare 
and looked with distrust on the grant of unlimited powers of 
taxation to Congress. The opposition to the Constitution in 
1 787-1 788, as an aristocratic document ^'squinting towards 
monarchy," had come chiefly from the agricultural debtor class. 
They were called Anti-Federalists then, while the men who 
supported the Constitution were called Federalists. The new 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



Federalists of 179I; Hamilton's party, were essentially the same 
people as the FederaHsts of 1787, since the very considerations 
which urged men to change the ineffective Articles of Confeder- 
ation for a vigorous Constitution — namely, the security of the 
national debt, the regulation of commerce, a dependable cur- 
rency, and an adequate national revenue assessed and collected 
by national authority — led them also to support the vigorous 
measures of Alexander Hamilton which were aimed at securing 
those desirable ends.^ 

The opponents of the Hamiltonian system took the name 
of Democratic-Republicans,^ as a protest against the aristo- 
cratic conception of a republic governed by ^^the rich, the well- 
born, and the able." They maintained in their debates in 
Congress and in their newspapers and pamphlets that the great 
augmentation of the public debt, resting as it must on a basis 
of increased taxation, meant the ruin of agriculture and an 
intolerable burden to the debtor class. For the labor of the 
farmer and the mechanic must eventually pay all these public 
charges. Every atom of funded debt," said Mercer of Mary- 
land in a debate in the House in 1792, ^^is so much taken from 
the value of the land . . . and so much diminished from the 
value of labor. . . . The effect of stocks^ is to transfer the 
fruits and labor of the many . . . into the hands of the opu- 
lent few, who exchange them for foreign luxuries and con- 
sume in an hour the labor of industrious families for years. 
It prevents a general diffusion of wealth by drawing it to a 

1 Professor Charles A. Beard has demonstrated in his "Economic Origins of 
Jeffersonian Democracy" the substantial identity of the Federalists of 1787 
with the Federalists of 1791. The men who made the Constitution had a very 
large share in putting it into effect, 26 out of the 39 signers being among the 
personnel of the first administration as members of Congress, judges, customs 
officials, etc. The few conspicuous men, like Madison and Patrick Henry, who 
changed from old Federalists into new Republicans or from old Anti-Federalists 
into new Federalists, were only the exceptions that prove the rule. 

2 The name was abbreviated into Democrats or Republicans, the latter used 
almost exclusively by the members of the party itself, and the former by their 
adversaries, often with the adjectives "vile," "wild," or "Jacobinical" prefixed. 

3 Meaning the 6 per cent bonds of the government issued in 1790 to take 
up the old certificates of debt, and the ^10,000,000 of Bank stock issued in 1791. 



1 64 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

center, and saps the foundations of Republican Government." 
Furthermore, the Republicans maintained that the Hamiltonian 
measures were sectional, favoring the mercantile-manufacturing 
interests of the North against the agricultural interests of the 
South. How well founded this charge was can be judged from 
the fact that only three votes in favor of the Bank bill came 
from the district south of the Potomac and only one vote against 
it from the region north of the Potomac. A correspondent wrote 
to Hamilton in 1792 from Virginia, There is no considerable 
mercantile circulating capital and there are but few moneyed 
men in the country [the state of Virginia] Georgia and 
the Carolinas (except for the city of Charleston) held very 
little of the public debt. It had been bought up by specu- 
lators from the great commercial centers of the North. Of 
manufactures there were practically none south of the Potomac 
in 1790. Funding, assumption, the Bank, the tariff, were all 
measures calculated to benefit that half of our country which 
lies north of Mason and Dixon's line. 

The issue between Federalists and Republicans was far more 
serious than a mere question of political policy or economic 
expediency, such as the curtailment of states' rights or the im- 
position of a high tariff. It was^ in the honest opinion of the 
protagonists on both sides, a question of the very existence of 
the government itself. Hence the violence of party strife, the 
vituperative language on the floor of Congress, the vehement 
quarrels in the cabinet, the venom of the press. To the Feder- 
alists all the fine rhetoric about freedom, in prose and verse, 
with which Philip Freneau filled the columns of the National 
Gazette — when he had space to spare after vilifying the ^^mo- 
narchical" administration from Washington down — was only a 
flimsy pretext to hide the real motives of the Republicans. 
They objected to the laws that were passed, said the Federalists, 
because they did not want to obey any laws at all ; they opposed 
the assumption of the debts because they did not want to 
pay their debts. Their vaunted ^'liberty" had already led to 
anarchy, and anarchy to national bankruptcy and impotence. 
Their democracy" meant the rule of the mob — the people" 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



whom Hamilton in a fit of impatient disgust called ^'a great 
beast/' and who John Adams declared were ^Hhe worst con- 
ceivable keepers of their own liberty/' since they could ^'neither 
judge, nor think, nor will as a political body." There never 
was a democracy," he continued, ^Hhat did not commit suicide." 
If our new republic was destined to survive, he thought, it would 
be because security, energy, and good faith marked its adminis- 
tration in the hands of the competent and responsible few, and 
not because we were all ^4eveled to an equality with French 
barbers." 

The Republicans were equally convinced that the preservation 
of the new American state depended on the maintenance of 
their theory of democratic government. We were ^'galloping 
into monarchy," said Jefferson. To what end the sacrifices of 
1 775-1 781 if another England were to be established on these 
shores, with its executive officers distributing the patronage and 
marshaling the factions in the legislature, with its Bank and 
its huge funded debt, with its aristocracy of finance and com- 
merce in league with the beneficent administration — with every- 
thing, in short; but the actual titles of nobility! Was the 
American Revolution the vindication of the natural and inde- 
feasible rights of man, as its great charter proclaimed, or was 
it only the vindication of the usurped and partial rights of ^'the 
rich, the well-born, and the able"? Jefferson confessed that he 
was not of those ^'who fear the rule of the people." He was not 
dismayed at the thought of occasional revolutions : they cleared 
the political atmosphere. He insisted on absolute freedom of 
speech and press. Better newspapers without a government 
than a government without newspapers, he said. Even the 
venerated name of Washington failed to weigh against this con- 
viction of the sacredness of democracy. The President's sense 
of propriety was shocked and his temper sorely tried by the 
attacks made on him and his administration in Freneau's 
Gazette. He let Jefferson, who was Freneau's patron, know of 
his chagrin, but the Secretary of State refused to dismiss 
Freneau from his modest position in the department or to in- 
tercede with him privately for the suppression of his diatribes- 



i66 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Valuing the personal friendship and the political services of 
both Jefferson and Hamilton, the President bore their quarrels 
in the cabinet with extraordinary patience and tried his best 
to reconcile their views. He wrote them each a personal letter 
in the summer of 1792, expressing his appreciation of their 
services and begging them to work together in harmony. The 
reply of each of the Secretaries showed deference to their chief, 
but no sign of sympathy for each other. Both were ready to 
resign from the cabinet, but neither was willing to modify his 
policy. Each threw the blame on the other. Every month 
strengthened the opposition to the Hamiltonian system. Spec- 
ulation forced the Bank shares to inflated levels and precipitated 
a financial panic in 1 792. The excise law, exceedingly unpopular 
in the back counties of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Caro- 
linas, where the moonshine stills furnished the farmers the most 
convenient currency in the form of whisky, was already pro- 
voking the resistance which culminated in the famous Whisky 
Rebellion of 1794."^ And, finally, Jefferson was busy in season 
and out of season with tireless pen and inexhaustible resources 
of appeal and encouragement in organizing the inarticulate 
democracy of the common people into a party which should be 
able to contend with the compact group led by Hamilton and 
his ^'corrupt squadron"^ in Congress. 

The first real trial of strength between the parties came in the 
election of 1792, when the Hamiltonian system went before 
the country for indorsement. It was an anxious moment for the 
Federalists. Besides the financial panic and the resistance to the 

iSee page i86. 

2 This was the name by which Jefferson stigmatized the members of Congress 
who held the public securities or "funds" of the United States. These men 
were doubly "corrupt" in Jefferson's view, first because they had "filched" the 
certificates of debt from the poor, and, second, because they voted in a body for 
the Hamiltonian policies which protected their financial interests. Hamilton, in 
a long letter to Washington in 1792, sought to disprove the charge of collusion 
between the Treasury and the members of Congress ; but Professor Beard has 
furnished the figures to justify Jefferson's assertion that had those actually in- 
terested in the outcome of the funding process refrained from voting on Hamil- 
ton's proposals not a single one of them would have been carried ("Economic 
Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy," p. 194). 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



167 



excise tax referred to in the last paragraph the administration 
was suffering under the disgrace of the murderous defeat of Gen- 
eral Arthur St. Clair's army of 1500 men by the Indians of the 
Northwest Territory (November 4, 1791). Jefferson counted 
on the farmers of the South, the malcontents of Pennsylvania, 
and the anti-Hamiltonians in New York, skillfully led by 
Clinton and Burr, to turn the tide of Federalism. Unless they 
should be buttressed by the strength of Washington's great 
name, the Federalists saw defeat looming. The ^'supercilious 
superiority" of John Adams, who would be the logical candidate 
of the party if Washington persevered in his intention to retire 
to his estate at Mount Vernon, would oppose too feeble a dike 
to the rising tide of Republicanism. Hamilton, by dint of much 
argument, prevailed upon the President to serve another term, 
and Jefferson, with equal sincerity but less anxiety, joined in 
the general prayer. Washington again received the vote of 
every elector, but the second honor on the ballot, instead of 
being distributed among eleven names as it had been in the 
election of 1 789, was contested between the Federalist and the 
Republican candidate, with none too large a margin in favor of 
the former.^ The Republicans elected a majority to the new 
House of Representatives. 



Foreign Entanglements 

According to Washington's own confession, it was not solici- 
tude for the Federalist party that persuaded him in 1792 to 
postpone his anticipated retirement to Mount Vernon, but the 
^'perplexed and critical posture of our affairs with foreign 
nations." It is difficult for us today, with our secure and well- 
defined borders, with our closely welded and tested Union, 
with our long and popular tradition (but lately disturbed) of 
indifference to the quarrels of the Old World, to realize how 

1 Adams carried New England, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Mary- 
land, and South Carolina (77 votes). Clinton carried New York, Virginia, 
North Carolina, and Georgia (50 votes). The new gtate of Kentucky (1792) 
gave its fpur votes to Jefferson, 



1 68 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



dangerously exposed we were in the earliest years of the repub- 
lic to the storms of European politics. The Revolution, al- 
though it secured our political independence, did not make us 
economically independent of Europe. After the war, as before 
it, our prosperity depended on our foreign commerce. Manu- 
factures were in their infancy. Laborers were scarce and land 
was abundant. Our enormous surplus of foodstuffs, forest prod- 
ucts, fish, salt, and tobacco had to be exchanged abroad for 
the luxuries, and even for some of the bare necessities, of 
civilized life. We were vitally concerned, therefore, in the 
commercial policy of the European maritime and colonial 
powers — France, Spain, Holland, and Great Britain. Further- 
more, the land between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi was 
a vast "arena of friction." Indian tribes and confederacies 
still harassed our settlements as they spread northward from 
the Ohio and southward from the Cumberland, while the agents 
of England and Spain, our neighbors on the north and south, 
were busy with a disavowed but rather obvious propaganda to 
encourage the Indians in their resistance to the establishment 
of our authority in the lands which had been ceded to us by the 
Treaty of Paris. England even retained garrisons in half a 
dozen fur posts strung along the lakes from Dutchman's Point 
on Lake Champlain to Mackinaw on Lake Michigan — all in 
the territory of the United States (see map, p. loi). 

Our diplomatic relations also were highly unsatisfactory. With 
Spain, who had been the ally of our ally France in the Revolu- 
tion, we had made no treaty at all in 1783, nor were we able 
to conclude one in the critical years that followed; although 
Spanish control of the Mississippi and Spanish possession of 
Florida (lying all along our southern border) made an agree- 
ment concerning the navigation of the river and the policing of 
the hostile tribes of Creeks and Cherokees an imperative neces- 
sity. With France we had a treaty, the earliest in our national 
history, dating from the dark days of the American Revolution 
(1778). But as this treaty was in the form of an alliance, 
pledging us under certain conditions to fight by the side of 
France for the protection of her American (West Indian) 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 169 

possessions, and giving her the privilege of using our ports for 
her prizes of war, it proved eventually to be more of an em- 
barrassment to us than the lack of a treaty with Spain. As to 
England, there was, of course, the famous treaty of 1783. But 
instead of settling old disputes, this treaty only opened new 
ones. Every article in it, except the first, which recognized the 
independence of the United States, led to contention and mutual 
charges of bad faith. 

To deal with the delicate diplomatic situation we should 
have had a well-organized department of foreign affairs, with 
the tradition of a firm and consistent policy, backed by the 
strength of the united nation. Instead of that, when Jefferson 
assumed the office of Secretary of State, in the spring of 1 790, 
he inherited a legacy of mistrust and contempt bequeathed by 
the weak government of the critical period. It was certain, 
under these conditions, that the first serious strife among the 
maritime nations of Europe would be the signal for trouble in 
America. And, indeed, it looked as if that trouble were at 
hand in the very first year of Washington's government, when 
Great Britain threatened to go to war with Spain over the 
seizure of British ships attempting to establish a trading-post 
on the western coast of America at Nootka Sound. In case of 
war the British would probably march across our territory 
from Canada to attack the Spaniards on the Mississippi. They 
would kindle war in Florida and Louisiana and rouse the Indian 
tribes on our borders. Fortunately, the war cloud blew over 
and our country was left in an apprehensive state of peace 
during Washington's first administration, to establish the federal 
government and put into operation the Hamiltonian fiscal 
system, which we have studied in the preceding section. 

Hardly was Washington seated in office for a second time, 
however, when the storm burst. In the first days of April, 1 793, 
a British packet sailed into New York bearing ominous news. 
The French Republic, whose baptismal victory over the Prus- 
sians at Valm}^ the Americans had celebrated with civic feasts 
and processions, with bell-ringings and banquets, only a few 
weeks before, had fallen into the hands of the radicals, who had 



THE UNITED STATES OF AIMERICA 



guillotined their king, hurled defiance against all the thrones 

of Europe, and added England, Holland, and Sardinia to the 
list of their enemies in arms. A few days after the arrival of 
this news Citizen Edmond Genet, the minister from the French 
Republic to the United States, landed in Charleston ^Vith the 
smell of blood on his ambassadorial garments." Genet was 
enthusiastic, vain, rash, and emotional. He came not as a 
diplomat but as the agent of the French Republic. Even before 
his credentials were presented at Philadelphia he began to 
violate the principles of international courtesy and law, equip- 
ping vessels in our ports to fight the British, enlisting our 
seamen, establishing courts for the condemnation of prizes, 
ordering French consuls to carry out his belligerent plans, de- 
manding an advance payment of the interest on the French 
loan for the purchase of war supplies. 

As Genet was making a triumphal progress up to Phila- 
delphia, feted by the Francophile Republicans of the Southern 
states, the President summoned his cabinet for advice as to how 
to treat the new envoy. Should he be officially received and the 
Republic which sent him recognized? If so, what would be 
the effect on our relations with those maritime countries with 
which the French Republic was at war and with which our trade 
was flourishing ? There was the embarrassing treaty of alliance 
of 1778 with France, pledging us to fight her battles and open- 
ing our ports to her prizes. Was there occasion now for France 
to demand fulfillment of the pledge and so involve us in a 
war with Great Britain ? The cabinet agreed unanimously that 
Genet should be received, but that, at the same time, a proc- 
lamation should be issued forbidding our citizens ^^to take part 
in any hostilities on land or sea with any of the belligerent 
powers" or to carry contraband goods to their ports. Washing- 
ton published the proclamation on the very day that Genet 
entered the capital (April 22, 1793). 

If the Proclamation of Neutrality gave umbrage to the friends 
of France, their objections were speedily overcome by the folly 
of Genet himself. In defiance of the warnings of Governor 
Mifflin of Pennsylvania^ and in spite of his own promise tg 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



Secretary Jefferson, he allowed the prize brig Le Petit Demo- 
crate, armed and manned at Philadelphia, to sail out of the 
Delaware River to cooperate with a force raised in our Western 
territory for an attack on Spanish New Orleans. He used the 
columns of the Republican press to inveigh against the govern- 
ment's cowardly abandonment" of its friends, threatened to 
appeal to the nation over the head of President Washington, 
scolded the cabinet, and finally declared that the French ^Vere 
punished for having believed that the American nation had a 
flag, that it had some respect for its laws [treaties], some con- 
viction of its force, and some sentiment of its dignity." This 
was more than even the stanchest friends of France could en- 
dure. Jefferson joined with Hamilton in asking for the recall 
of the obnoxious envoy 

On June 5, 1794, Congress supplemented Washington's proc- 
lamation by passing a neutrality act, which has been the basis 
of our policy toward belligerents ever since. It was framed on 
the twin principles developed by the learned Jefferson in his 
negotiations with Genet; namely, ^^the right of every nation to 
prohibit acts of sovereignty from being exercised by any other 
nation within its limits" and '^the duty of every neutral nation 
to prohibit such acts as would injure one of the warring powers." 

The ablest exposition and defense of the Proclamation of Neu- 
traHty was made by Alexander Hamilton in a series of seven 
papers published in the Gazette of the United States over the 
signature ^Tacificus." In them he answered the objections of 
the Republicans ( i ) that the President had exceeded his powers 

1 Genet never returned to France. During his mission to the United States 
the party of the Girondists, to which he belonged, was overthrown by the 
Jacobins, and Robespierre was waiting to send Genet to the guillotine. Our 
government magnanimously refused to give him up. He married a daughter 
of Governor Clinton and lived in New York to a ripe old age. In 1870 the poet 
William CuUen Bryant described him as he had seen him more than forty years 
before: "A tall man with a reddish wig and a full round voice, speaking 
English in a sort of oratorical manner, like a man making a speech, but very 
well for a Frenchman. He was a dreamer in some respects, and, I remember, 
had a plan for navigating the air in balloons , . , shaped like a fish and pro- 
pelled by sails and guided by a rudder." 



172' THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

in taking out of the hands of Congress the question of deciding 
war, (2) that we were repudiating our just debt of gratitude to 
France, and (3) that the proclamation was a ^'sop to England," 
since we had not issued any such paper when France went to 
war with Prussia and Austria nearly a year before. Hamilton 
had little difficulty in showing the difference between declaring 
war (which lay in the power of Congress) and defining our 
status of peace (which was the province of the executive), or in 
proving that the entrance of maritime nations like England and 
Holland into the war had a significance for the United States 
far different from that of the purely continental conflict between 
France and the Germanic powers. As to our debt of gratitude, 
it was to the government of Louis XVI that we owed it, not 
to the violent and unstable faction that had overthrown his 
dynasty and shed his blood. Finally, the treaty of 1 778 pledged 
us to aid a France attacked in its American possessions, not a 
France proclaiming war against the thrones of Europe.^ 

The immediate result of the war between France and Eng- 
land was to bring our strained relations with the latter power 
almost to the breaking-point. For nine years following the 
peace of 1783 we had been trying in vain to secure the fair 
execution of the treaty — the evacuation of the fur posts on the 
Great Lakes, compensation for the slaves carried off on British 
ships, and admission to privileges of trade with the British 
colonies. Great Britain did not deign to send us a minister 
till 1 791; and when the minister, Mr, Hammond, came, our 
Secretary of State made little progress with him. England's 
part, Jefferson claimed, was simple. She had but to show a sign 
of her good faith by evacuating the fur posts. The United 
States had already advised the states to compel the payment 
of the debts which their citizens owed to British merchants; 

1 Hamilton's argument would have been strengthened by citing the attitude 
of the French revolutionary government itself toward treaties concluded under 
the old regime. In 1789 the National Assembly decided that it would not abide 
by the "Family Compact" of 1761 with Spain and help that nation if it went 
to war with England over the Nootka Sound controversy. In 1792 the Legisla- 
tive Assembly asserted the right of determining which of the prerevolutionary 
treaties it would accept or reject. 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



173 



but as this required ''the action of thirteen independent states 
scattered over a continent/' it demanded ''time, temper, and 
tact in its attainment." Hammond made no reply to Jefferson's 
able and temperate note. 

Such was the critical state of our relations with England 
when the European war broke out. The French Republic im- 
mediately threw open its West Indian ports to American trade. 
Great Britain, invoking the Rule of 1756, which forbade a 
country at war to open to neutrals ports that were closed to 
them in time of peace, began to seize our ships trading with the 
French islands. On June 8, 1793, a British order declared that 
"all vessels loaded wholly or in part with corn [grain], flour, 
or meal, bound to any port in France, should be stopped and 
brought into convenient harbors, and the foodstuffs on board 
should be sold perforce to his Majesty's government." This 
was followed in November by orders to seize all ships carrying 
the products of French colonies or carrying food supplies to 
the ports of French colonies.^ 

In the early months of 1 794 it looked as if war were inevitable. 
The measure of England's offense seemed full. The news came 
in March of the confiscation orders of November, and with it 
came stories of the seizure of our ships, the condemnation of our 
cargoes, and the impressment of our sailors into the British serv- 
ice. Lord Dorchester, the governor of Canada, was reported to 
have made a speech to the Indians of our Northwest to the effect 
that war would probably break out between England and the 
United States within a year. A sudden treaty of peace between 
Portugal and Algiers, negotiated by the British consul at Lisbon 
in 1793, had led to the withdrawal of the Portuguese fleet from 
the Mediterranean, leaving American merchantmen there in the 
lurch. Before we could get frigates built to protect our Medi- 
terranean commerce the Algerian pirates had multiplied their 

iQf course, it was not to encourage American trade that France opened her 
West Indian ports to us, but to save the islands from starvation when England's 
mighty sea power should shut off their commerce with Europe. Still it was a 
great opening for our ambitious merchants, and soon after the proclamation 
hundreds of American ships were sailing into the rich harbors of Martinique, 
Antigua, and Santo Domingo. 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



captures of American sailors tenfold. In spite of Lord Gren- 
ville's assurance of good will it was impossible, in the heated 
state of affairs^ for Americans to believe that the withdrawal of 
the Portuguese fleet was ^^not in the least intended to injure" us. 
A temporary embargo was laid on commerce with Great Britain 
(March 26), and a nonintercourse bill failed to pass the Senate 
only by the casting vote of Vice President Adams. Bills were 
put through Congress to fortify our harbors, to build new 
frigates, to strengthen our artillery service, and to sanction the 
call of 80,000 militia from the states. Dayton of New Jersey 
proposed a virtual declaration of war in a motion to sequester 
money owed by our merchants to creditors in England, as a 
compensation for the seizure of our vessels by British cruisers. 
Men were beginning to drill in our seaports. There is a 
panic," wrote John Adams, ^^lest peace should prevail." 

War with England in 1794 would have been a national 
calamity. We were just recovering from the ravages of the 
Revolution and the critical period which had followed. We had 
no navy to defend our commerce. Our borders were vexed by 
constant raids of hostile Indians. A pioneer wrote to Secre- 
tary Knox in 1790 that 1500 persons had been killed by Indians 
in Kentucky or on the way thither. In the Ohio region they 
had inflicted a terrible defeat on General St. Clair in 1791 — a 
defeat still unrepaired when the European war broke out. The 
discontent of the back-country farmers of Pennsylvania with 
the excise was gathering in the storm that burst in the Whisky 
Rebellion of 1794. We needed peace to set our house in order. 
Furthermore, a war with England would have had disastrous 
economic effects. In December, 1793, Jefferson sent to Congress 
an elaborate report of our foreign trade. The figures for the 
four leading commercial countries of Europe were as follows : 





Exports to 


Imports from 


Total 




$9,363,416 


$15,285,428 


$24,648,844 




4,698,735 


2,268,348 


6,967,083 


Holland 


1,963,880 


1,172,692 


3,136,572 




2,005,907 


335,110 


2,341,017 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



175 



To go to war with England in the face of these figures would 
be to quarrel with our bread and butter. England furnished us 
with more than three fourths of the dutiable goods from which 
our national revenue was collected. 

Finally, war with England might have meant the dissolution 
of the republic. Our people were divided into hostile factions, 
for the cleft between Federalists and Republicans opened by 
Hamilton's financial program was widened by foreign partisan- 
ship. The Federalists admired the stability of the British con- 
stitution and were inclined by political conviction, by social 
instinct, and by economic interest to an alliance between the 
government and ^^the rich, the well-born, and the able.'' They 
hated the horrid principles of Jacobinism, which proceeding 
from one excess to another had made France a theatre of 
blood." They believed that, in spite of England's nonfulfill- 
ment of the treaty of 1 783, we must keep on good terms with the 
nation which furnished the bulk of our commerce. On the other 
side, the Republicans, disdaining the argument of the pocket- 
book, appealed to the sentiments of generosity and gratitude 
in America. France had sent us men, ships, and money to 
help secure our independence. France was our ally now, and 
England a surly neutral. France was a republic, proclaiming 
the end of the reign of despots and of the privileges of aristocrats 
in the Old World as we had proclaimed it in the New World. 
France had thrown open her ports to us, while England forbade 
us to use them. Should we treat our enemy better than our 
ally? We had dismissed Genet for overstepping the bounds 
of propriety, but we tamely allowed England to retain our fur 
posts, to seize our ships, and to impress our sailors. If the 
French faction did not want war with England, at least they 
were willing to go to the very verge of war. 

But Washington was determined to have peace. In April, 
1794, he appointed John Jay, Chief Justice of the Supreme 
Court, as special envoy to Great Britain to negotiate a treaty. 
Jay labored several months with Lord Grenville before he could 
bring back even the moderate terms contained in the treaty 
which bears his name. The British agreed to give up the fur 



176 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



posts by June, 1796. The claims of England on account of the 
debts whose collection had been interfered with by the states^ 
and the claims of the United States for damages arising from 
the violation of their neutral rights, were both to be referred to 
commissions of arbitration. Trade with the East Indies was 
freely opened to the United States, but only meager concessions 
were granted in the West Indian trade. Our ships could not be 
above seventy tons' burden and they might not carry any 
molasses, sugar, coffee, or cotton from the islands or from the 
mainland to any foreign port. On the question of stolen slaves, 
the stoppage and search of our vessels, and the impressment 
of American sailors the treaty was silent. 

Jay brought home the treaty in the spring of 1795, and the 
Senate in extra session ratified it (except for the objectionable 
Article XII on the West Indian trade) by the bare two-thirds 
majority necessary. When this ^'treaty of amity, commerce, 
and navigation^' was pubHshed, it raised a storm of protest in 
the country. John Jay, a statesman ^'as pure as the ermine 
of the judicial robe which clothed his shoulders," was accused 
of having sold his country to England. He was burned in 
effigy from Boston to Charleston. The merchants of the North 
were indignant over the commercial clauses, and the planters of 
the South over the failure to secure compensation for the slaves, 
the provisions for the settlement of their debts to British mer- 
chants, and the inclusion of cotton in the list of commodities 
which could not be exported to Europe.^ Hamilton was stoned 
in the streets of New York for defending Jay's integrity in the 
face of an angry crowd. Washington was vilified by the Re- 
publican press in such terms as he said could scarcely be 
applied to a Nero, to a notorious defaulter, or even to a common 
pickpocket." 

lit is one of the curious coincidences of history that in the very days when 
Jay's Treaty was being negotiated Eli Whitney was securing the patent for his 
cotton gin — the invention which was destined to make cotton the most im- 
portant of our exports for more than half a century. As most of the debt to 
British creditors was owed by the South (Jefferson thought that "Virginia owed 
near as much as all the rest of the states together"), the significance of the pro- 
hibition of the export of cotton to British ports can be readily seen. 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



177 



Nevertheless, the Jay Treaty, as an alternative to war, was 
a wise and statesmanlike measure. It was also the harbinger of 
good news from other quarters. While Jay was in the midst of 
his negotiations with Grenville, ^'Mad Anthony" Wayne had 
completely routed the Indians under ^'Little Turtle" and Te- 
cumseh at the battle of the Fallen Timbers near the western 
end of Lake Erie (August 20, 1794), and so wiped out the dis- 
grace of St. Clair's defeat three years before. The treaty of 
Greenville followed a year later, by which the Indians gave up 
all claim to the rich bounty lands and company grants which 
composed over half the present state of Ohio. A treaty with the 
Creeks and Cherokees in the South (October, 1795) brought 
peace from one end of the frontier to the other for the first time 
since Pontiac's great conspiracy of 1763. 

This same eventful year of 1795 saw also the danger of the 
secession of our Western territory averted by the conclusion of 
a treaty with Spain. Thomas Pinckney, our minister to London, 
was sent as special envoy to the court of Madrid, to take up 
negotiations over the navigation of the Mississippi and the 
boundaries of the Floridas at the point where Jay and Gardoqui 
had left them a decade before (see page 126). Pinckney ar- 
rived at Madrid at a favorable moment. Don Manuel de Godoy, 
the all-powerful minister, had just concluded a treaty with the 
French Republic which won him the title of ^Trince of Peace" 
and which exposed his country to the danger of a war with Eng- 
land — a danger which he saw enhanced by ^^the treaty which 
unknown to us the English cabinet has negotiated with the 
United States of America" (the Jay Treaty). To insure our 
neutrality, therefore, and to flatter still further his own inordi- 
nate vanity, Godoy signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo with 
Pinckney (October 27, 1795). Spain recognized the thirty-first 
parallel of north latitude as the boundary between the United 
States and Florida, promised to restrain the Indians from at- 
tacking our borders, and gave us full and free right to navigate 
the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, with the privilege of 
transshipping from river boats to ocean-going vessels at New 
Orleans (or some other port of deposit) free of duty. It was 



i7S 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the concession of every point that we had demanded of Spain 
since the Revolution. 

The only European nation with which our relations grew 
worse instead of better during the closing years of Washington's 
administration was our old ally France. It seemed as if an evil 
genius intervened between the two republics in the last decade 
of the eighteenth century^ to sow misunderstanding, suspicion, 
and discord. Gouverneur Morris, Washington's first minister 
to France, was as little acceptable to the radical leaders in Paris 
as their minister Genet was to us. Morris was a high Feder- 
alist, an intimate in the circles of the court and the aristocracy, 
and a personal friend of King Louis XVI. From time to time 
rumors reached our shores that he had been seized by the 
Jacobins and guillotined. His recall was demanded as an offset 
to Genet's (1794), and Washington sent in his stead James 
Monroe of Virginia, with instructions to ^^show our confidence 
in the French Republic without betraying the most remote mark 
of undue complaisance." Monroe was as pronounced a Repub- 
lican as Morris was a Federalist. At his reception by the Con- 
vention, instead of presenting his credentials with the customary 
expressions of polite formality, he made a warm speech com- 
plimenting the republican army on its recent victories and 
praising the Jacobin government. He was embraced by the 
president of the Convention with the fraternal kiss amid 
thunders of applause. 

John Jay was busy across the channel negotiating his treaty 
with Lord Grenville when Monroe arrived in Paris. With more 
zeal than discretion Monroe assured the French government 
that Jay's business was only to settle the disputes over the fur 
posts and the stolen negroes ; that there would be no commercial 
treaty made between the firm ally and the bitter enemy of the 
French Republic.^ W^hen, therefore, the terms of the Jay Treaty 

lit seems as though Monroe was justified in holding this belief, however 
unwise he may have been in expressing it. For Jay in his instructions had been 
warned against ''allowing the British government to detach us from France or 
to derogate from our treaties and engagements with that nation." More- 
over, Monroe's own instructions contained such sentences as these: "You may 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



179 



were known at Paris, indignation was intense. Monroe, cha- 
grined, tried to hold back the French government from ^'ungen- 
tle remonstrances." The treaty, though ratified by the Senate, 
might still be made inoperative by the refusal of the House, in 
which there was a Republican majority, to appropriate the 
money to establish the joint tribunals which the treaty called 
for.^ The Directory (as the executive board of five men at the 
head of the French Republic was called) informed Monroe 
bluntly that the moment the Jay Treaty should have the sanc- 
tion of Congress the alliance with America was at an end. True 
to its word, the Directory issued a decree in July, 1796, that the 
Republic would ''treat neutral vessels [American] in the same 
manner as they suffer the English to treat them." Although the 
French minister Adet remained in this country^ his government 
suspended relations with us until the United States should 
"return to sentiments and measures more conformable to the 
interests of the alliance and sworn friendship between the 
two nations." 

Meanwhile Monroe was recalled for disobeying his explicit 
but difficult instructions to explain our relations with England 
in a way satisfactory to the French Directory, and returned 
home to pour out his complaint against the Federalist admin- 
istration in a labored but not very convincing apology of over 
five hundred pages. His successor, Charles C. Pinckney, a 
Federalist from South Carolina, was not only not recognized by 
the Directory but was not even given the "card of hospitahty" 
which would allow him to remain on French soil. He retired to 
Amsterdam (February, 1797). When the news reached America 
that her regularly appointed minister to the foremost power of 
continental Europe had been treated like a common spy, John 

declare the motives of that mission [Jay's] to be to obtain immediate compen- 
sation for our plundered property and restitution of the posts," and "You will 
be amply justified in repelling with firmness any imputation of the most distant 
intention to sacrifice our connection with France to any connection with 
England." 

2 It was not until April, 1796, that the appropriation was actually carried 
through the House by the narrow vote of 51 to 48, after a most eloquent plea 
by Fisher Ames of Massachusetts. 



i8o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

Adams, who had just succeeded Washington in the presidency, 
called a special session of Congress and in his opening speech 
declared that France had treated us neither as allies nor as 
friends nor as a sovereign state" and that we must convince her 
and the world that ^Ve are not a degraded people humiliated 
under a colonial spirit of fear." But still Adams decided, and 
both houses of Congress agreed, to try a fresh attempt at nego- 
tiation ^^on terms compatible with the rights, duties, interests, 
and honor of the nation." He appointed John Marshall, a 
Federalist of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry, a Republican of 
Massachusetts, to join minister Pinckney in Paris, where 
they were all courteously received by the foreign minister 
Talleyrand (October 8, 1797). 

But presently the three envoys were subjected to the most 
outrageous treatment. Certain gentlemen called on them in an 
unofficial capacity, yet giving them to understand that they 
represented the views of the French government. These visitors, 
who were undoubtedly the secret envoys of Talleyrand, de- 
manded three things as a preliminary to the opening of the 
negotiations : first, some passages in President Adams's speech 
to Congress must be apologized for ; second, the United States 
must extend a loan to the French Republic, which it might do by 
buying up at par certain Dutch obligations to France which 
were selling at a discount of 50 per cent; third, a little matter of 
$2 50,000 must be quietly slipped into the hands of the Directors. 
The American commissioners at first hardly grasped the mean- 
ing of these preposterous propositions ; but when the envoys said 
plainly, You must pay money," they replied as plainly, ^^No ! 
not a penny ! " After waiting three months in vain for any move 
on the part of the French government, the Americans asked 
to be allowed to return home. Talleyrand prevailed by some 
flattery on the Republican member, Gerry, to stay for further 
negotiations, and Gerry consented to stay and be fooled for a 
few months longer by that prince of diplomatic liars and bul- 
lies. Marshall returned immediately to the United States, 
and Pinckney was allowed to take his sick daughter to the 
south of France. 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



i8i 



When President Adams sent the dispatches of the French 
commissioners to Congress (April 3, 1798) and published them 
to the nation/ Republicans united with Federalists in a policy 
of preparation for the war which the folly of the French 
Directory seemed determined to precipitate. Harbors were for- 
tified, a Navy Department was created (with Benjamin Stod- 
dert of Maryland as its first secretary), new frigates were 
built, the army was enlarged, and Washington was called to the 
chief command, with Hamilton as his ranking major general 
and commander in the field. A new tax on dwellings and slaves 
was levied to yield $2,000,000, while a loan for $5,000,000 more 
was authorized, for which our straitened government had to 
pay 8 per cent. The French treaties of 1778 and the consular 
convention of 1788 were abrogated. American privateers were 
authorized to seize French prizes on the high seas. War was 
not actually declared, but a state of war existed. Before we 
finally came to terms with the French Republic our com- 
manders Decatur, Barry, Truxtun, Bainbridge, Porter, and 
Hull had captured over eighty armed vessels flying the tricolor. 
In the midst of our war preparations in the midsummer of 1798 
John Marshall returned from France with the first verbatim 
report of the indignities to which the commission had been sub- 
jected. He was feted at dinners where Joseph Hopkinson's new 
song ^^Hail, Columbia" was shouted and the toast ^'Millions for 
defense, but not one cent for tribute was greeted with cheers. 
Adams forwarded Marshall's papers to Congress with the 
spirited message, ^^I will never send another minister to France 
without the assurance that he will be received, respected, and 
honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and 
independent nation." 

The French Republic did not want war with the United 
States. Our trade was too valuable to her West Indian islands, 
which, cut off from European commerce by the British fleet 
and given over wholly to the production of sugar and coffee, 

iln the dispatches as published by Secretary of State Pickering the names 
of the French envoys were suppressed, and the men were designated simply as 
Messrs. X, Y, and Z. Hence the incident is called "the XYZ Affair." 



1 82 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



had to be fed by the United States. Talleyrand wanted only to 
levy blackmail on our government and bully us out of our 
treaty with England. When he saw the effect of his behavior, 
this political chameleon quickly changed his color. He feigned 
surprise and indignation at the conduct of the agents whom he 
had sent (doubtless with his own instructions) to the American 
commissioners. He repudiated them and all their works. He 
sent word to William Vans Murray, our minister at The Hague, 
that he was anxious to treat with America on an amicable basis, 
and gave assurances in Adams's own words that any minister 
sent by the United States would be treated ^^as the representa- 
tive of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation." 

President Adams wanted war no more than Talleyrand. 
Apart from seeing his personal rival Alexander Hamilton lead- 
ing the armies of the United States, there were public reasons 
of great weight. Spain had made her treaty with France, but 
was dilatory in carrying out her treaty with us (see page 177). 
War with France would probably involve us in war with Spain, 
and war with Spain would mean the reopening of the whole 
question of the allegiance of our Western country. How pre- 
carious the situation was can be seen from a letter written 
by Fisher Ames to Hamilton in January, 1797: ^^The western 
country scarcely calls itself dependent on the Union. France is 
ready to hold Louisiana. The thread of connection is slender, 
and that event I fear would break it." We should have to 
invoke the aid of Great Britain as the only country able to 
protect our shipping against France and Spain, and so we 
should be plunged into the midst of the European wars and 
become a pawn in the game of the European peace. 

It took courage in John Adams, when the country was ring- 
ing with preparations for war, to choose peace. Hamilton, the 
powerful head of a faction opposed to the President, and the 
real master of the two chief cabinet officers, Pickering and 
Wolcott, wanted war.^ Adams, therefore, without consulting 

1 Hamilton planned to cooperate with a Venezuelan adventurer by the name 
of Miranda in freeing the Spanish colonies in South America and bringing them 
under Anglo-American influence to balance the power of France. Hamilton 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



183 



his cabinet (as, indeed, he was not legally bound to do), sent 
to the Senate for confirmation, on February 18, 1799, the name 
of William Vans Murray as minister to the French Republic. 
In order to get the Senate's sanction he was obliged to substi- 
tute a commission for the single minister. He named Oliver 
Ellsworth, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and WilHam 
Davies of North Carolina (after Patrick Henry had declined) 
to join Murray at the French capital. Secretary Pickering, 

shocked and grieved" at this sudden assertion of the presi- 
dential prerogative, was able to delay instructions to the new 
commission until Adams came down in person to Philadelphia, 
from his summer vacation in Massachusetts, to see the matter 
through. The envoys sailed early in November, 1799. 

They were but four days out from port when one of the 
most dramatic scenes of modern history was enacted at Paris. 
Napoleon Bonaparte, returning from Egypt with the aureole 
of victory about his head, overthrew the corrupt Directory and 
drove the protesting deputies of the French Assembly out of 
their chamber at the point of the bayonet. This famous coup 
d'etat made Napoleon master of France. He took the title 
of First Consul. It was to the ^'man of destiny," then, and not 
to the ^^five-headed monster of anarchy" (the Directory), that 
the American commissioners were presented early in April, 
1800. Their task was not hard, for Napoleon was well dis- 
posed. He was not concerned with the intrigues of the party 
in Paris which, ever since the mission of Genet, had been 
attempting to nourish a French faction in the United States. 
He wanted to inaugurate his usurped regime with splendid 
military victories and generous diplomatic triumphs. On Sep- 
tember 30, 1800, a convention was signed providing for the 
exchange of consuls and the regulation of maritime relations 

wrote to Miranda in August, 1798: "The plan, in my opinion, ought to be a 
fleet of Great Britain and an army of the United States, and a government for 
the liberated territory agreeable to both the cooperators, about which there will 
be no difficulty. To arrange the plan a competent authority from Great Britain 
to some person here is the best expedient. Your presence here in that case will 
be extremely essential. We are raising an army of about 12,000 men." 



1 84 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



between the two nations. The First Consul did not insist on 
the renewal of the treaties of alliance and commerce of 1778, 
but, as an offset, he refused to entertain claims for damages 
done to our shipping by French cruisers in the Franco-British 
wars. It was a fair bargain. It saved us from a war with 
France, and by making us friends with the victor of Marengo 
it undoubtedly contributed to our peaceful acquisition of the 
vast Louisiana territory three years later. The credit for the 
treaty is due to John Adams, who dared to use his authority 
for the most unpopular act that an executive can perform; 
namely, to hold in peace a nation that is set on war. He ap- 
praised his public services rightly when he asked that this one 
alone should be engraved on his tombstone. 

So the century closed with the United States at peace with 
all the three great powers whose interests and possessions in 
the New World and whose wars and rivalries in the Old World 
threatened to reduce our country to the condition of a mere 
make-weight in the balance of European politics. Factions at 
home had thrown us now into the arms of France and now into 
the arms of England^ while Spanish intrigue threatened to dis- 
rupt the Union by the severance of our Western states. Two of 
the treaties made in this decade of Federalist power (the Jay 
Treaty of 1794 and the French treaty of 1800) saved us from 
imminent war. A third (the Pinckney treaty of 1795) secured 
us the use of the Mississippi and so opened our trans-Allegheny 
region to world commerce. To the remarkable abilities and 
patient labors of the diplomats of Washington's and Adams's 
administrations — Morris, Marshall, Murray, Jay, Ellsworth, 
and the Pinckneys — America owes a debt of deepest gratitude. 
They did a large part in bringing the country safely and hon- 
orably through the most difficult and dangerous decade, with 
one exception, in all its history since the adoption of the federal 
Constitution. 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



The Downfall of Federalism 

Before Governor Davies returned from Paris with the Napo- 
leonic convention which settled the long dispute with France 
and enabled us to enter the new century at peace with the 
world, — a troubled peace which was to last until our second 
war with England, — an event of prime importance had hap- 
pened at home in the triumph of the Republican party at the 
polls. The election of 1800 was, with the exception of Abraham 
Lincoln's victory in i860, the most important in our history. 
It was not only the first party revolution in America ; it was also 
the culmination of a ten years' struggle of the agricultural class, 
the small traders, and the artisans, under the leadership of 
Thomas Jefferson, against the monopoly of public office and the 
direction of national policy by the aristocratic followers of 
Hamilton, Washington, and Adams. In the last section we 
carried the history of our foreign diplomacy down to the close 
of John Adams's administration. We must now turn back to 
complete the story of our domestic affairs in the last decade of 
the eighteenth century. 

So long as Washington was at the head of the government 
universal reverence for the Father of his Country kept the fires 
of poHtical passion from bursting into flame, although, as 
Fisher Ames said, ^Hhey glowed beneath the surface Hke a 
burning coal pit." Every measure adopted for the estabhsh- 
ment of the Hamiltonian policy of national concentration, every 
move in the diplomatic game with Great Britain and France, 
intensified the antagonism between the Federalists and the 
Republicans, the ^^Anglomen" and the Jacobins." The Feder- 
alists were firmly intrenched in the administration, while the 
Republican opposition, though widespread, was unorganized. 
^^Are the people in your quarter as well contented with the 
proceedings of our government as their representatives say they 
are?" wrote Jefferson to Richard H. Lee in 1791 ; ^Hhere is a 
vast mass of discontent gathered in the South, and when and 
how it will break God knows." 



i86 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



At the close of the year 1793 Jefferson resigned from the 
cabinet. He professed to have done with politics and talked 
of planting his cabbages in peace at Monticello. But even if 
his own restless political mind had allowed him to abjure 
politics, he was too thoroughly committed to the leadership of 
the Republican cause to withdraw. He began forthwith an 
ardent campaign to organize the ^S'ast mass of discontent/' not 
only in the South but all over the land^ into a poHtical party. 
^^Almost never/' says Professor Channing, ^^has a party been 
so efficiently and so secretly marshalled and led." Jefferson 
kept up an enormous correspondence with his coworkers from 
Massachusetts to Georgia. He pursued his patient propaganda, 
making a gain of one hundred Republican votes in this county 
or half a dozen Republican seats in that legislature. He did not 
himself ^yTite for the public, but he laid the pens of able pam- 
phleteers like ^Madison, IMonroe, Giles, and John Taylor under 
contribution, while he encouraged journalists and hack writers 
to attack the Federalist doctrines and the Federahst leaders 
with httle scruple for the niceties of language. As leader of the 
opposition, he watched the march of the administration with 
jealous scrutiny, discovering the cloven hoof of the ^^monocrat'^ 
at every step. 

A few months after Jefferson's resignation the farmers of 
western Pennsylvania broke into open revolt against the tax- 
gatherers sent to collect the excise on their whisky.^ It was the 
first instance of forcible resistance to the new federal govern- 
ment, and both Washington and Hamilton were determined to 
crush it with exemplary severity. The President called out 
15.000 militia from the states of Pennsylvania, ^Maryland, New 
Jersey, and Virginia and marched with them himself as far as 
the town of Bedford, Pennsylvania, leaving Hamilton in com- 
mand. ^'No citizen of the United States," wrote Washington 
on quitting the expedition, ''can ever be engaged in a ser\ice 

^Currena- in the form of either specie or bank paper was as scarce as grain 
was plentiful in the back counties. It cost so much to transport the grain over 
the poor roads to the East that the farmers found it more profitable to distill 
their corn and rye and use the liquor as currency. 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



187 



more important to their country. It is nothing less than to con- 
solidate and preserve the blessings of that Revolution which at 
much expense of blood and treasure constituted us a free and 
independent nation." The insurgents broke up when they heard 
that a force three times as large as they could hope to resist was 
marching on them. Some of the ringleaders of the rebellion" 
were arrested and tried, and two were condemned to death for 
treason. Washington pardoned them ; but in his speech to Con- 
gress a few weeks later he threw the blame for the uprising on 
the ^'self-created societies" of Democrats which had multiplied 
rapidly in the country since the visit of Citizen Genet. 

The Republicans under Jefferson's lead attacked the policy 
of the government in the Whisky Rebellion at every point. In 
the first place, the excise was an infernal tax," imposed on the 
farmers for the benefit of the capitalists and unnecessary were 
it not for the swollen interest charges with which the fictitious 
debt had burdened the people. Furthermore, it was disgraceful 
for a government founded on the will of the people to send 
thousands of armed troops against a few hundred of its own 
discontented citizens and to magnify a local ^^riot" into a civil 
war, in order to allow Alexander Hamilton to parade his janis- 
saries." Finally, where was our boasted freedom, if men were 
to be condemned for meeting in self-created societies" to 
criticize freely the acts of the public servants whom they had 
elected? Democracy itself was a self-created society." It 
would be at an end when the people were reduced to silence 
under the censorship of an autocratic, capitalistic, and military 
regime. ''It is wonderful," wrote Jefferson, "that the President 
should have permitted himself to be the organ of such an attack 
on our fundamental liberties." Had he forgotten the "self- 
created societies" of patriots who had met at Faneuil Hall and 
the Raleigh Tavern? 

The treaty which Jay brought back from England in the 
spring of 1795 (see page 175) furnished further political capi- 
tal for the Republicans. They had been accused of obsequious- 
ness to France at the time of the Genet mission ; now they could 
visit a like reproach on the heads of their opponents. "Mr. Jay 



i88 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



has not presented his country's injuries in a firm style," wrote 
a Repubhcan lawyer of Virginia to Madison, ''but has suppli- 
cated the benevolence of his Britannic Majesty for relief." 
The treaty, said Jefferson, was ''an execrable thing," and really 
nothing less than "an alliance between England and the Anglo- 
men of this country against the legislature^ and the people of 
the United States." In their fight to prevent the ratification 
of the treaty and the appropriation of funds needed to carry 
it into effect, the Republicans abused the people of Great 
Britain in unmeasured terms and charged the government of 
Great Britain with perfidy and violence. In the single year 
following the ratification of the treaty, the Republican press 
asserted, British cruisers had seized 300 American vessels and 
impressed 1000 American sailors. The only result of the mono- 
crats' toadying to Great Britain had been to alienate our only 
friend (France) without concihating our most dangerous enemy 
(England). 

When the House finally appropriated the money for the 
execution of the Jay Treaty (April 30, 1796), men's minds were 
already turning to the presidential election. Washington re- 
fused to serve a third term. It is not likely that he would have 
again received the unanimous indorsement of the country 
if he had stood. For with the resignation of the Repubhcan 
members of the cabinet (Jefferson and Randolph) he had 
become a strict Federalist, declaring to General Knox in 1795 
that it would be "suicidal" to the administration to appoint 
to office any man who was out of sympathy with its policies. 
He published a Farewell Address (September 17, 1796), in 
which, speaking out of the bitter experience of the last four 
years, he warned his fellow countrymen "to steer clear of 
permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" 
and to shun the destructive effects of the spirit of faction at 
home. But the latter counsel fell on unheeding ears. The 

1 Jefferson is here referring to the bill for nonintercourse with Great Britain 
which was passed in the House of Representatives (the legislature) in the spring 
of 1794, but was defeated in the Senate by the casting vote of Vice-President 
Adams. 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



Republican press rejoiced openly that at last the name of 
Washington was to cease to give currency to political 
iniquity in covering the nefarious policies of Federalism with 
its aegis ; and certain Republican members of Congress, includ- 
ing Andrew Jackson, refused to vote the usual complimentary 
reply to the President's annual message. The Federalists were 
still strong enough to carry the election of 1796, although their 
candidate, John Adams, had but a single vote beyond the bare 
majority in the electoral college. Thomas Pinckney of South 
Carolina was put forward by the Federalists for vice president, 
but, as several of the New England electors refused to write 
his name on their ballots with Adams's, his vote fell behind Jef- 
ferson's. The figures were Adams 71, Jefferson 68, Pinckney 59. 
As the Constitution then stood (Art. I, sect. 2, par. 2), the 
Federalist Adams became president and the Republican Jef- 
ferson vice president.^ 

John Adams was in his sixty-first year — robust, rotund, 
learned, consequential, and fully conscious of his merits, which 
were great. Coming into prominence as one of the earhest 
advocates of the independence of the colonies in the Conti- 
nental Congress, he had labored for a quarter of a century in 
public station for the establishment of the American Republic, 
serving on dozens of committees in Congress, a member of the 
peace commission of 1783 at Paris, and the first minister of 
the new republic at the courts of the Netherlands and Great 
Britain. He had nominated George Washington for com- 
mander of the continental army and recommended Thomas 
Jefferson as draftsman of the Declaration of Independence. 
In his Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the 
United States," written while he was at the court of St. James, 
he had furnished European political students with the first 
elaborate and scholarly description of the mixed" form of 

iThe New England electors "scratched" Pinckney because of a rumor that 
Alexander Hamilton, who was hostile to Adams, would influence a few Federalist 
electors in the South to "scratch" Adams and thus allow Pinckney to be re- 
turned as president. Thus Hamilton's little trick to keep Adams out of the 
presidency resulted only in putting Jefferson into the vice presidency. 



1 90 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



government in the American democracy. John Adams's patri- 
otism, rectitude, and courage were beyond question, but he was 
pompous, intractable, and vain. His mind, open wide to the 
learned discussion of political theory, narrowed to an un- 
deviating, rectilinear obstinacy in the execution of political 
authority. The large receptivity and sustained power of bal- 
anced judgment which characterized George Washington were 
lacking in Adams. A "republican" after the pattern of his 
great masters Milton, Sidney, Locke, and Harrington, he was 
a convinced believer in government by the "natural aris- 
tocracy," "the rich, the well-born, and the able," the men who 
had property and reputation at stake. He feared the tyranny 
of the masses as much as he abhorred the tyranny of the despot. 
The "people," he believed, are the very worst guardians of 
their own interests, being ignorant, fickle, and easily led by 
clever demagogues. Hence "simple democracy" (untempered 
by the aristocratic element) was to him the "most ignoble, un- 
just, and detestable form of government, its only excellence 
being that it soon passes away." A certain ungraciousness of 
manner, running into querulous suspicion when he was thwarted, 
made it difficult for Adams to command the best services of 
his subordinates — even reluctant at times to care to com- 
mand them. Preoccupied with his own rectitude, he sought less 
and less to reconcile and harmonize conflicting views in his 
cabinet, his Congresses, and his party. He ended by glorying 
in his independence of them all. 

The difficulties which confronted John Adams on his inau- 
guration in the spring of 1797 were enough to try a man of 
consummate tact and patience. Now that criticism of Fed- 
eralist policies could no longer be interpreted as slanders on 
the Father of his Country, political passions broke loose in 
a storm of abuse. Men who had known each other for years, 
wrote Jefferson, crossed the street to avoid saluting each other. 
Statesmen of high reputation rivaled the scurrilous hack writers 
of the yellow press in the vehemence of their language; "fire 
eating salamanders," "poison sucking toads," "venomous ser- 
pents," were some of the choice epithets which Fisher Ames 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



191 



bestowed on his Republican opponents. There was faction, too, 
within the ranks of the Federalists. Hamilton, although re- 
tired to private life, aspired to be ^'the power behind the 
throne." He wielded enormous influence over the chief cabinet 
officers, — the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and War (Picker- 
ing, Wolcott, and McHenry), — whom Adams, perhaps out of 
filial respect for Washington, unwisely retained until near the 
close of his term. These men antagonized the President, be- 
trayed cabinet secrets, and almost openly took their orders from 
Hamilton. Either nothing will be done," wrote Wolcott to 
Hamilton on the occasion of an important conference on foreign 
policy, ^'or your opinion will prevail." Pickering actually apolo- 
gized to Hamilton for measures taken by the President which 
the cabinet were not able to prevent. Hamilton disliked Adams 
on personal grounds for his puritanism and pretentiousness. He 
also knew that Adams was no friend of the funding measures, 
being neither a stockholder nor a speculator in government se- 
curities, and that he disliked a commercial and financial plutoc- 
racy as much as he did a ^'simple democracy." But most of all 
he resented the President's standing in the way of his military 
ambitions, when it appeared certain that war with France 
would give him the opportunity of joining the American army 
with the British fleet in wresting the South American republics 
and the region of the Gulf of Mexico from Spanish rule and 
posing as the patron of a government consolidated in an im- 
perialistic policy.^ 

When our indignation with France over the X Y Z Affair was 
at its height in the summer of 1798 and we were increasing 
our appropriations for fortifications, arms, and ships, the Fed- 
eralist Congress passed a number of acts which historians have 
unanimously condemned as vindictive, rash, arbitrary, and 
futile. Since most of the immigrants who came to our shores 
were radicals who swelled the ranks of the Republican party, a 
Naturalization Act was passed (June 18) requiring all aliens who 
had come over since 1795 to live in this country fourteen years 
before they could obtain citizenship, to which must be added 

^For Hamilton's scheme, see page 182, note. 



192 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the seven or nine years prescribed by the Constitution before 
they could be eligible for Congress. A few days later (June 25, 
July 6) came Alien Acts: one giving the president power at 
his discretion for a period of two years to remove from the 
country any alien whom he judged dangerous to our security, 
and to punish with imprisonment those who remained or re- 
turned in defiance of his decree ; the other empowering him to 
arrest or deport enemy ahens in time of war. Finally, a Sedition 
Act (July 14), to run to the end of Adams's term, punished 
with heavy fines and long imprisonment any person found 
guilty by the federal courts of ^'combining and conspiring to 
oppose the execution of the lawS; or publishing false or mali- 
cious writings against the President, Congress, or the govern- 
ment of the United States." Harsh as these acts were, they 
did not satisfy the extreme FederaHsts. Harper of South Caro- 
lina, the administration leader in the House, would have shut 
the door to American citizenship in the face of the alien. ^^It 
is high time," he said, ^^to recover from the mistake with which 
we set out under the Constitution of admitting foreigners to 
citizenship, for nothing but birth should entitle a man to this 
privilege." The Sedition Act, as first introduced into the Senate 
by James Lloyd of ^laryland, declared that every Frenchman 
was an enemy of the United States, and that to give a French- 
man aid or comfort was treason punishable with death. To such 
folly can panic lead ! ^ 

It is true that England and France both had severe repressive 
laws at this time. England had suspended the Habeas Corpus 
Act, forbidding seditious meetings, and prosecuted a number 
of ^'agitators" who invoked their ^^natural right" of free 
speech. The French Republic would not allow an alien to 
remain within its borders without the sanction of the author- 

iJt is only fair to say that the two great Federalist leaders Hamilton and 
Marshall opposed this extreme legislation. Hamilton wrote to Wolcott (June 29) , 
"Let us not establish tyranny; energy is a very different thing from violence." 
Yet Hamilton was in favor of having libels, when leveled at the officers of the 
United States, cognizable by the federal courts, so that the reputation of the 
officers of the general government "might not be left to the cool and reluctant 
protection of the state courts, always temporizing and sometimes disaffected." 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



193 



ities (see the case of Pinckney, p. 179). But there was no need 
for such measures in America. We were at peace when the 
offensive acts were passed. We were thousands of miles re- 
moved from the storm centers of Europe. There was as 
little danger of seeing a French army on our shores, President 
Adams remarked testily to Secretary McHenry, as there was 
of seeing one in heaven. The Republican leaders like Jeffer- 
son, Madison, Gallatin, and Mason were no more connected 
with French plots or Jacobinical intrigues to ruin our country 
than were their Federalist opponents. All were sincere patriots, 
differing only (even if differing boisterously) on measures of 
American policy domestic and foreign.^ 

The Alien and Sedition Acts met with instant condemnation 
by the Republicans. In the House, Livingston protested that 
"they would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity," and 
Gallatin reminded the Federalists of the consecrated principle 
of English liberty from Milton to Burke, that "error can be 
successfully opposed by truth with argument as the weapon." 
Jefferson, who from his point of vantage in the vice presidency 
kept his party lieutenants informed of the temper of the ad- 
ministration, wrote to Stephen Mason that he believed the acts 
to be "merely an experiment on the American mind to see how 
far it will bear an avowed violation of the Constitution." If 
they should be accepted by the American people, he thought, 
they would be followed by acts making the presidency a life 
tenure and finally a hereditary dignity like the British crown. 
"I fancy," he added, "that some of the State legislatures will 
take strong ground on this occasion." Yet when John Taylor 
of Virginia, an ardent Republican pamphleteer, suggested the 
secession of Virginia and North Carolina from the Union, 
Jefferson rebuked him in language that would have done credit 
to a Webster or a Lincoln. 

1 President Adams, much to the disgust of the ultra-Federalists, declined to 
make a single arrest or deportation under the Alien Acts. Ten Republican editors 
were punished by the federal courts under the Sedition Act. The results of this 
policy of panic were entirely incommensurate with the excitement aroused. "In 
pursuing the offending bee the Federalists knocked over the hive." 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Jefferson prepared a set of resolutions against the acts for 
the legislature of North Carolina, but when unexpected Fed- 
eralist strength developed in that state in the autumn of 1798, 
he transferred them to the legislature of Kentucky, where they 
were introduced by John Breckinridge on November 10 and 
immediately adopted. The Kentucky Resolutions, nine in num- 
ber, declared that our federal government had been created by 
a compact between the states and was not the exclusive or final 
judge of the extent of the authority delegated to it, since ^Hhat 
would have made its discretion and not the Constitution the 
measure of its powers." The general government having been 
given no power to define or punish common-law offenses, but 
only those crimes defined under the Constitution, the legislation 
of the summer of 1798 was usurped in principle and ^'altogether 
void and of no effect." Furthermore, it contravened several 
positive provisions of the Constitution, such as the guarantee 
of free speech and a free press (Amendment I), the protection 
against deprivation of life^ liberty^ or property without ''due 
process of law" ( Amendment Y), trial by jury (Art. Ill, sect. 2, 
par. 3), and the prohibition of Congress to interfere before the 
year 1808 with "the migration or importation of such persons 
as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit" 
(Art. I, sect. 9, par. i). The legislature of Kentucky called 
upon the legislatures of the "co-states" to concur in declaring 
the offensive acts "void and of no effect" and in uniting with 
her "in requesting their repeal at the next session of Congress." 
A few weeks later Madison introduced resolutions of the same 
tenor into the Virginia legislature. Without actually pronounc- 
ing the acts "void," Madison's resolutions contended that when 
the government exercised powers not granted in the compact, 
the states "have the right and are in duty bound to interpose 
for arresting the progress of the evil." Whether the "inter- 
position" should take the form of petitions to Congress or 
processes in the courts or an amendment to the Constitution 
or forcible resistance to the execution of the acts, the Virginia 
Resolutions did not say. But many years afterwards Madison 
denied that there had been any idea of forcible resistance in 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



195 



either his or Jefferson's mind. The Resolutions were for politi- 
cal effect," he said, ^'intended as a party platform to arouse the 
Republican sentiment throughout the country and secure a 
general condemnation of the Federalist centralization." When 
all the states north of the Potomac sent unfavorable replies 
to the invitation of the Kentucky legislature, and the states 
south of the Potomac sent none at all, the legislature contented 
itself with reaffirming its protest (November, 1799), this time 
declaring explicitly that ^'nullification by state sovereignties" 
of all unauthorized acts of Congress was ''the rightful remedy." 

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions furnished fine cam- 
paign material for the Republicans in the election of 1800, as 
the astute Jefferson had foreseen. Their principles were widely 
disseminated and gave rise to reports by several state legisla- 
tures. Vermont repudiated the "compact theory" in an elabo- 
rate argument. A committee of the Maryland House of 
Delegates denied the competence of a state legislature to declare 
an act of Congress void. The Federalist pamphleteer Cobbett 
lamented ''the imbecillity of our form of government," which 
was "a jingling and chaotic confusion of federal and state 
governments." On the other hand, the Republicans maintained 
that if the states had no right to judge when the Constitution 
was violated by an act of Congress, they were reduced to mere 
provinces in a consolidated empire and might as well cease to 
elect and pay their legislatures. They would soon become, as 
Taylor said, only "speculative commonwealths to be read for 
amusement, like Harrington's 'Oceana' or More's 'Utopia.'" 

As the presidential campaign of 1800 approached, it was 
evident that the election would be bitterly contested. The 
Federalists had a large majority in Congress, elected during the 
war fever of 1798. The offices, of course, were in their hands. 
But, on the other side, the Republicans were no longer the 
unorganized mass of farmers and artisans that they had been 
when Jefferson resigned from the cabinet. The tireless prop- 
aganda of the vice president and his party managers had 
begun to bear fruit. A strong Republican organization flour- 
ished in New York, in spite of the factional quarrels of the 



196 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

Livingstons, the Burrs, and the Clintons. Thomas McLean 
carried the state of Pennsylvania against his Federalist opponent 
Ross by a sweeping majority in the election of 1797. Even the 
sacred citadel of Federalism, New England, was rudely invaded 
by the "Jacobins." "A considerable change is working in the 
minds of the people to the Eastward," wrote Jefferson to 
Madison. In Massachusetts the vote for the Republican candi- 
date for governor rose from 8000 in 1797 to over 17,000 in 1800, 
and the Federalists were obliged for the first time to issue 
election addresses to the "friends of society, religion, and good 
order" to support the administration. The Federahst majority 
in the legislature of Vermont was reduced in the election of 1800 
from over 100 to 34. New England still remained in the Feder- 
alist column, but the grip of the old aristocracy was loosened. 
There was an enormous increase in electioneering and popular 
meetings. The vote for governor in Massachusetts increased 
over 80 per cent in the years 1 798-1800. 

The Federalists labored under severe difficulties. As the 
danger of a serious conflict with France waned, prosecutions 
under the odious Sedition Act took the form of persecutions. 
In the exciting days of 1798 Congress had authorized a direct 
tax of $2,000,000 on lands, dwellings, and slaves, supplemented 
by new stamp duties and a loan of $5,000,000. When Congress 
met in the autumn of 1799, the military ardor of the previous 
year had cooled. The loan was reduced to $3,500,000. But 
falling import duties had reduced the revenue by $1,000,000, 
while the expenses of government mounted from $6,000,000 in 
1797 to $9,300,000 in 1799. The effect of the direct taxes was 
already beginning to be felt. John Fries, an auctioneer in 
Pennsylvania, led a riot against federal officers who came to 
assess the window tax. The farmers shot the officers in the 
legs, and women poured scalding water down on their heads. 
Order was not restored until the militia was called out. The 
Republicans made capital out of the economic situation. "The 
physician for the country's ills is already at hand in the person 
of the tax gatherer," wrote Jefferson. Monroe scored the admin- 
istration for "preparing for a war which does not exist, and 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



197 



expending millions which will have no other effect than bringing 
war upon us." Their position was strengthened when the offers 
of conciliation came from France and Adams appointed his 
second commission (see page 183). In February, 1800, en- 
listments were suspended, and the next month the army was 
disbanded. Nothing that the Federalist Congress could have 
done would have contributed more to the success of the Re- 
publicans than these acts. By them, as Professor Bassett well 
says, ^Hhe campaign of 1800 was robbed of that warlike front 
behind which the Federalists for two years had found it so 
profitable to hide." 

But the most serious handicap under which the Federalists 
entered on the election of 1800 was the disaffection in their 
own ranks. President Adams had shown his patriotism in his 
firm stand against the insults of the French Directory and his 
wisdom in accepting their tardy advances on return to better 
sense. He had shown his independence in preserving his coun- 
try's peace at the expense of selfish military ambitions, and his 
moderation in refusing to inaugurate a reign of terror in 
America by the wholesale arrest of aliens and the hanging of 
rustic rioters. For these virtues he was cursed by the men of 
his own party, who had hectored and thwarted him since 
the beginning of his administration. These malcontents first 
thought of trying to persuade Washington to run for president 
again, but the great man died on December 14, 1799. When 
it was clear that Adams was the choice of the majority of the 
party, and the caucus had named General C. C. Pinckney as his 
running-mate, the malcontents still tried to repeat the trick 
of 1796 (see page 189) by getting the electors of South 
Carolina to vote for Pinckney and Jefferson. But Pinckney 
honorably refused to be a partner to any such deal, even though 
it would bring him the presidency. Hamilton, disappointed in 
his military ambitions and incensed by the dismissal of his 
satellites Pickering and McHenry from the cabinet, foolishly 
indulged his pique by writing a long and bitter pamphlet against 
Adams and wound up by advising the electors to vote for 
him nevertheless! 



1 98 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Jefferson was the unanimous choice of the Republican cau- 
cus, with Aaron Burr of New York for vice president. The 
RepubHcan platform is well summed up in a letter which 
Jefferson wrote to Elbridge Gerry early in 1799: 

An inviolable preservation of our present federal Constitution in 
the true sense in which it was adopted by the states, ... a govern- 
ment vigorous, frugal, and simple, applying all possible savings of 
revenue to the discharge of the public debt, . . . reliance for our 
internal defense on our militia solely until actual invasion, . . . free 
commerce with all nations, political connections with none, and little 
or no diplomatic establishment, . . . freedom of religion and the 
press, . . . and an end of all violations of the Constitution to silence 
by force the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens 
against the conduct of their agents. 

Behind these specific points of policy was the great basic 
principle of Republicanism — the interests of the agrarian de- 
mocracy, supported by state and, local governments, against 
the capitalistic aristocracy in control of the federal machinery. 

The campaign was violent and slanderous. Jefferson was 
accused of having robbed a widow and her children of trust 
funds, of having vituperated George Washington and ridiculed 
the Christian religion. The Federalist editors predicted dire 
consequences if he should be elected. Our country would be 
turned over to a Jacobinical mob, and every sacred institution 
overturned. The government's obligations would be repudiated, 
and all honest citizens would be involved in ^^one common, cer- 
tain, and not far distant ruin." The restraints of civilization 
would be cast off, and every decent man would have to go 
about armed to defend his property, his wife, and his children 
from his Jacobin neighbor." The Reverend Timothy Dwight, 
president of Yale College, prophesied that in the event of 
Jefferson's election ^^the Bible- would be cast into a bonfire, our 
holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our 
wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into 
the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat." The 
Republican warnings, if less ludicrous, were no less earnest. 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



199 



The triumph of the Federalists, they said, would mean the 
disappearance of the last guarantee of democratic government ; 
the state would be absorbed into a tyrannical oligarchy at 
Washington, in disgraceful vassalage to Great Britain. A titled 
nobility and a hereditary monarchy would be the eventual 
outcome. 

Political intrigue was added to frenzied electioneering. Penn- 
sylvania was a Republican state, but the Federalists, who 
had a majority in the upper House, refused to concur in the 
choice of electors by joint ballot until they were assured of 
seven of the fifteen electoral votes of the state. In New York 
Aaron Burr, by the cleverest arts of the political manager, had 
secured the election of a Republican delegation from New York 
City to the legislature in the spring of 1800. This insured a 
majority in the new legislature (which was to choose the presi- 
dential electors) for Jefferson and Burr. Hamilton then wrote 
a letter to Governor Jay, begging him to reconvene the old 
legislature and have it hastily pass a law providing for the 
choice of the New York electors by districts, so that at least 
four or five of its electoral votes might be saved for the 
Federalists. ^^No scruples of delicacy and propriety," wrote 
Hamilton, ought to hinder the taking of a legal and constitu- 
tional step to prevent an atheist in religion and a fanatic in 
politics from getting possession of the helm of state." The 
honorable governor filed the letter away with the simple in- 
dorsement, ^Troposing a measure for party purposes which 
it would not become me to adopt." New York's vote went to 
Jefferson, and with it the election. Adams carried New Eng- 
land, the stronghold of the financial interests/ with New Jersey, 
Delaware, and parts of Maryland and North Carolina. He 
had sixty-five votes to seventy-three for Jefferson. 

iThe four original New England states received $440,800 in the interest and 
capital disbursements on the public debt in 1795, out of a total of $1,180,909. 
Massachusetts alone received in interest one third more than all the states 
south of the Potomac. "The thrifty Yankees of Connecticut held more of the 
public debt than did all the creditors in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia" 
CC. A. Beard, "The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy," p. 393). 



200 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



As every one of the Republican electors had voted for Burr 
as well as for Jefferson, the two men were tied for first place 
and the election was thrown into the House of Representatives.^ 
Every Republican elector^ of course^ had intended that Jeffer- 
son should be president. Had Burr been an honorable man, 
he would have immediately acquiesced. But Burr was not 
an honorable man. Ambition led him to contest the election in 
the House and to lower his dignity by accepting the support 
of the Federalists, who used him only that they might defeat 
Jefferson. The balloting began on February ii, 1801. On the 
first ballot Jefferson carried eight states out of the sixteen, just 
one short of the necessary majority. Burr carried six, while 
two (Maryland and Vermont) were equally divided and lost 
their vote. Thirty-five ballots were taken in the next five days 
without any change in the vote. The Federalists knew that 
they could not elect Burr, but they planned to maintain the 
deadlock until after inauguration day and then have a new 
election declared. On the other hand, McKean and Monroe, 
the Republican governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia, began 
to threaten to call out their militia to seat Jefferson in the White 
House by force. Hamilton too used his powerful influence in 
favor of Jefferson as the lesser of two evils. ^'As to Burr," he 
wrote, ^Hhere is nothing in his favor. He is truly the Catiline 
of America"; whereas Jefferson, with all his faults and fanati- 
cisms, was ^'neither depraved nor desperate." If elected he 
would probably ^'pursue a temporizing rather than a violent 
system." The wisest course for the Federalists to follow, 
thought Hamilton, was to withdraw their opposition to Jeffer- 
son after securing from him assurances on some cardinal points 
of policy, such as the preservation of the fiscal system, the 
maintenance of the army and navy, and the promise of no 
general proscription of Federalist officials. These assurances 
gained, the Federalists of Vermont, Maryland, Delaware, and 

1 Provision was made against the repetition of this anomaly by the Twelfth 
Amendment, in 1804, which prescribed that the electors "name in their ballots 
the person voted for as president and in distinct ballots the person voted for as 
vice president." 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



201 



South Carolina cast blank ballots on the thirty-sixth vote 
(February 17), and Jefferson was elected by ten states to four/ 
The Federalists, defeated in the presidency and both Houses 
of Congress, made an effort in the last days of their power to 
secure the judicial branch of the government. While the ballot- 
ing for Jefferson and Burr was going on, the expiring House 
passed a Judiciary Act (February 13), creating several new 
federal districts and grouping the district courts into six cir- 
cuits, for which sixteen new judges were to be appointed, with 
marshals, attorneys, and clerks to match. The measure had 
been planned over a year before, partly to provide for the grow- 
ing business of the federal courts and partly to relieve the 
justices of the Supreme Court from continual traveling on 
circuit. But it was interpreted by the Republicans as simply 
a trick of the Federalists to fortify themselves in the one 
branch of the government which was beyond the reach of 
popular elections. President Adams hastened to make the 
appointments to the new judgeships before his successor should 
come into office. He was still signing their commissions at nine 
o'clock of the evening before inauguration day. At dawn he 
entered his carriage and drove away from the White House.^ 

iThe four old New England states held doggedly to Burr to the end. The 
casting of blank ballots by the Federahst representatives from Vermont and 
Maryland released those states to the RepubUcan column. As there were no 
Republican representatives from Delaware and South Carolina, the final vote 
of those states was null. Not a single Federalist, therefore, actually voted for 
Jefferson. Much controversy arose over the pledges given by Jefferson. It seems 
probable that he did not give them in person, but let it be known through 
friends that he would respect the Federalist establishments. For the whole 
controversy the student may see C. A. Beard's " The Economic Origins of Jeffer- 
sonian Democracy," pp. 410 ff. 

2 Two stories have been current touching the close of Adams's administration: 
one that he was signing the commissions up to midnight of March the third, when 
Levi Lincoln, Jefferson's designated Attorney-General, stood over him, watch in 
hand, and ordered him to desist; the other, that Adams drove away from the 
White House early to show his disrespect for Jefferson. Both these stories are 
pure fables. The reason why Adams left the White House in such haste was 
the sudden death of his son Charles in New York. He entertained no ill feeling 
toward Jefferson. A few days after the inauguration he wrote his successor, 
"heartily wishing" him "a quiet and prosperous administration." 



202 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The immense significance of the election of 1800 in our his- 
tory has often been overlooked. Because the Republicans on 
coming into power did not destroy the fiscal system which the 
Federalists had set up or propose sweeping amendments to 
the Constitution curtailing the federal power, historians have 
spoken of the meagre results of the Jeffersonian revolution." 
But that is to miss the point by too great absorption in insti- 
tutional history, to the neglect of social and ethical currents. 
The triumph of Jefferson at the polls was the indorsement of 
a process of political education which had been going on, under 
his chief leadership, for a decade — an education in democracy. 
The Federalists were without faith in the people. For them 
government belonged by right to ^^the rich, the well-born, and 
the able," whom the people were to ^Wenerate." The suffrage 
was narrowed by property qualifications and religious tests. In 
New England ^^magistrates were often chosen by one twentieth 
of the legal voters." The few families who assumed leadership 
during the Revolution had acquired ^^an unrepublican ascend- 
ency," which made them regard any opposition as actual re- 
bellion against the reigning powers." They refused to recognize 
the Republicans as a legitimate party, calling them ^^insur- 
gents," ^'factional Jacobins," ^'unprincipled, disorderly, am- 
bitious, disaffected, morose men," who were tempted by vile 
newspapers 'Ho talk on political subjects and to wish to manage 
the affairs of the nation," instead of submitting themselves to 
those who were ''over them in the Lord." As against this 
debasing doctrine of tutelage the Republicans vindicated the 
principles of the Declaration of Independence. "There was a 
time in this country," wrote a Republican journalist, "when 
God had created all men equal and had given to each certain 
unalienable rights, but the new creation of Federalism has 
thrown into confusion the first creation. It has created four 
or five hundred gentlemen having entire right to rule and reign." 

The Jeffersonian doctrine of "the cherishment of the people" 
conceived of the government not as a power outside of and 
above the people but as the people itself acting in its politi- 
cal capacity. It necessitated the greatest possible diffusion of 



WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 



203 



power among a progressively educated body of citizens, so that 
the evils inevitably arising in a democracy might be slowly 
purified out through the aeration of public opinion. Instead 
of abandoning ^^the detestable practice of electioneering/' and 
passively ^Venerating the men of their former choice," as they 
were bidden to do by the Federalists, the people should be 
roused to ^^an universal attention to the duty of election." 
A jealous watch on their rulers was their only guarantee of free- 
dom. Their liberties were too precious to delegate to an aristoc- 
racy. The propagation of this democracy was the Jeffersonian 
campaign, and the election of 1800 was but its culmination. 
The enormous growth of the vote even in New England, out 
of all proportion to the increase in population, was a witness to 
the progress of the Jeffersonian ideal, for the figures show that 
the Republican vote was not taken away from the Federalists 
but was rather added to theirs. Politics were popularized. 
Addresses, platforms, pledges, discussions, multiplied. The 
people woke to their privileges and responsibilities. ^^Now the 
Revolution of 1776 is complete," said the Aurora on the morn- 
ing after the election. Since 1800 no political party in our 
land, Whig or Democrat, Republican or Socialist, Prohibitionist 
or Populist, has made its appeal to any less comprehensive an 
electorate than the whole body of American freemen. 



CHAPTER V 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 

A just and solid republican government maintained here will he a standing mon- 
ument and example jar the aim and imitation of the people of other countries; 
and I join with you in the hope and belief that they ivill see from our example 
that a free government is of all others the most majestic. — Thomas Jefferson 

The Louisiana Purchase 

Thomas Jefferson was nearing the closing of his fifty-eighth 
year when he was inaugurated in the new federal city of Wash- 
ington. Both the place and the man were suggestive of a new 
chapter in our history. Swamp land and forest formed the 
lonely environs of the few residences, boarding-houses, and 
shops that were scattered among the rising public buildings. 
The stately Pennsylvania Avenue of today was scarcely more 
than a footpath cut through the bushes and briars/' with gravel 
and chipped freestone dumped on the spongy patches left by 
the Tiber Creek, which ran hard by. The contrast with the 
lively city of Philadelphia, the center of the colonial aristoc- 
racy, was striking. ^'We need nothing here," wrote Gouverneur 
Morris in humorous vein, ^'but houses, men, women, and other 
little trifles to make our city perfect." The new president, who 
had never felt at home in the aristocratic circles of New York 
and Philadelphia, left the pomp and ceremony of the FederaHst 
regime behind him. Instead of driving with coach and six to 
the inaugural, he walked. In the place of the speech to Con- 
gress, so reminiscent of an address from the throne, he sent a 
written message. The stiff weekly levees were superseded by 
receptions to which everyone was welcome to come pele-mele to 
shake the President's hand. The British minister Merry was 
scandalized when Jefferson received him in negligee with slip- 
pers run down at the heels, and Merry's secretary said that the 

204 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 205 



President reminded him of ^^a tall large-boned farmer" — a 
characterization which Jefferson would probably have felt to 
be flattering. 

Jefferson's political views were well known through the pub- 
licity of his long struggle against the Federalists, and they were 
concisely summed up at the close of his inaugural address: 
equal and exact justice to men of every shade of political and 
religious opinion; peace and friendship with all nations, alli- 
ances with none; respect for the rights of the state govern- 
ments, together with the preservation of the powers of the 
national government in strict accord with the provisions of the 
Constitution; free elections, free speech, and a free press, but 
obedience to the law as expressed in the will of the majority ; 
reliance on a disciplined militia rather than on a regular army 
for our defense ; public economy, honest payment of our debts, 
encouragement of agriculture and commerce^ preservation of 
the sacred rights of Habeas Corpus and trial by jury; trust in 
persuasion rather than in force to right abuses and win policies, 
since error of opinion may be tolerated when reason is left 
free to combat it." Political enemies were astonished at the 
President's conciliatory tone when he declared that differences 
of opinion were not always differences of principle, and that all 
were brethren in their common devotion to the Union : We are 
all Republicans, we are all Federalists." Did he mean that he 
hoped that all the Federalists were about to become Repub- 
licans, or that in the hands of a Republican administration the 
measures established by the Federalists could be safely oper- 
ated ? His whole administration goes to prove, at any rate, that 
he considered the government safe in the hands of the friends 
of the people, even if they took as great liberties with the letter 
of the Constitution as did the ^'monocrats." 

If followers hoped or opponents feared that Jefferson would 
make any drastic change in the institutions of the Federalists, 
they were mistaken. Hamilton had correctly estimated the 
new president as more revolutionary in theory than in action. 
The Bank and the public funds remained undisturbed. The 
military and naval establishments, while diminished, were not 



206 



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abolished. One might have expected the author of the Kentucky 
Resolutions to initiate some measures for the curtailment of 
the powers of the ^'general government," but instead Jefferson 
announced in his inaugural address and supported in his policy 
^'the preservation of the general government in its whole Consti- 
tutional vigor as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and of 
our safety abroad." One might have thought that so bitter a 
critic of the dangerous" power of the federal judiciary would 
have suggested to his Republican Congress (which he controlled 
with a mastery equaled by few of our presidents) the passage 
of an amendment limiting the tenure or the power of the justices 
of the Supreme Court; but he made no such move. The sum 
total of his assault on the institutions of his Federalist predeces- 
sors was the abolition of the internal revenue duties, the reduc- 
tion of the military establishment, and the repeal of the Judiciary 
Act of the closing days of John Adams's administration. 

For the two chief portfolios of State and Treasury, Jefferson 
selected James Madison of Virginia and Albert Gallatin of 
Pennsylvania, both men of long and influential experience in 
Congress. Henry Dearborn and Levi Lincoln, both of Massa- 
chusetts, were made Secretary of War and Attorney-General 
respectively, and Gideon Granger of Connecticut was put at 
the head of the post office. The Navy Department was given 
to Robert Smith of Maryland. Thus the heads of half the 
executive departments were chosen from New England, the 
stronghold of Federalism, whose electors had cast but a single 
vote for Jefferson in the February balloting. Madison was 
the only m_ember of the cabinet from the states south of the 
Potomac, and even he, according to the simon-pure Republicans 
of Virginia and the Carolinas, was somewhat tainted with 
heresy from his former association with Hamilton in the author- 
ship of ^^The Federalist." If Jefferson meant by this recog- 
nition of the North in his choice of advisers to discourage the 
idea that the Republicans were a sectional party, it remained 
none the less true that with the coming of his administration 
political leadership passed to the South. Samuel Smith of 
Maryland, Randolph and Giles of Virginia, and Macon of 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 207 



North Carolina dominated the House, where the Republicans 
had a majority of over two to one. The Northern states saw 
measure after measure passed which they believed prejudicial 
to their political prestige and their economic interests, and more 
than once during this period of Southern control (in 1804, 
1808, and 1 8 14) they mooted separation from the states beyond 
the Delaware. 

In the closing month of his term President Adams had sent 
over two hundred nominations to the Senate. This attempt to 
saddle on the incoming administration a host of Federalist 
officeholders by midnight" appointments Jefferson considered 
positively indecent. He spoke of Adams's ^^dead clutch on the 
patronage/' and sent word to the officers whose commissions 
had not yet been delivered to consider their appointments as 
never having been made. A certain William Marbury, who was 
one of the forty-two justices of the peace appointed for a five- 
year term in the District of Columbia, sued the Secretary of 
State for the delivery of his commission. When the case of 
Marbury vs. Madison came before the Supreme Court in its 
February session of 1803, it brought a momentous decision 
from Chief Justice Marshall. The court refused to issue the 
mandamus compelling the delivery of the commission, and de- 
clared that that part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 which con- 
ferred upon it this power was unconstitutional and hence null 
and void. It was the first instance of the annulment by the 
Supreme Court of an act of Congress, the first assumption of the 
power, nowhere granted to the court by the Constitution, of 
declaring acts of Congress unconstitutional. This precedent, 
followed ever since, has made the Supreme Court, which was 
established as a judicial tribunal, one of the most powerful 
political influences in our history. For example, in 1895, by 
the majority of a single vote, it declared the income-tax clause 
of the Wilson-Gorman tariff bill unconstitutional and deprived 
the government of millions of dollars of revenue. The new 
circuit judgeships which had been created by the Judiciary Act 
of February 13, 1801, and which, according to John Randolph's 
sarcastic comment, were provided in order to make the judicial 



2o8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



department ^'a hospital for decayed politicians," were abolished 
by the repeal of the act. 

Economy was the chief policy of the new administration, and 
to this policy Jefferson was impelled by both political and 
economic principles. The collection and disbursement of large 
sums of money tempted the central government to enlarge its 
powers, to compete with European nations in world politics, 
and to encroach on the resources which the states needed for 
their local development. The central government should con- 
fine itself to provision for defense against invasion and should 
reduce its connection with foreign countries to the lowest terms 
possible. Two or three foreign ministers only were necessary 
(to England, France, and Spain, with whom we unfortunately 
still had unsettled relations), but diplomatic establishments in 
Holland, Portugal, and Prussia were a needless extravagance 
and were forthwith suppressed. Again, as champion of the 
agricultural interests, Jefferson saw that the burden of taxation, 
on which the credit of the public funds was based, fell largely 
upon the farmers. Not only must these chief producers of the 
country's wealth not be further burdened by additions to the 
public debt but even that burden which was upon them must 
be lightened as soon as possible by the discharge of the debt. 

Secretary Gallatin was even more enamored of economy 
than was the President. Coming from Switzerland, he had 
found a home as a naturalized American citizen among the 
farmers of western Pennsylvania, whose cause he had espoused 
in the Whisky Rebellion. He was gifted with an orderly mind, 
considerable powers of persuasion, and a prodigious capacity 
for work. He has generally been rated as second only to 
Alexander Hamilton in the skillful management of our coun- 
try's finances. His special merit, perhaps, was the introduction 
of strict accountability into our finances by the budget system 
of specific appropriations against which only funds pertinent 
to the appropriations could be drawn. Gallatin outlined his 
policy in his first report. Retrenchment in army, navy, and 
the diplomatic service, together with various economies in the 
civil service, were calculated to reduce the expenditures of the 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 209 



government from $7,000,000 to $3,000,000, exclusive of interest 
on the public debt. The revenue had grown, as a result of our 
prosperous foreign commerce in the midst of the European 
wars, from less than $4,000,000 in 1792 to over $10,000,000 in 
1 801. Gallatin far too modestly estimated the revenue for the 
next ensuing years at $10,600,000. Thus there would be an 
annual surplus of over $7,000,000 for application to the interest 
and principal of the public debt. On the basis of these figures 
the debt would be entirely wiped out by the year 181 7. Gal- 
latin's plans were rudely interrupted by the distress of our 
commerce and the outbreak of our second war with England 
before the year 181 7, but they progressed so well during the 
first decade that by 1810 the debt was reduced by $27,500,000, 
in spite of the purchase of Louisiana from France and the 
expense of four years of warfare against the African pirates 
in the Mediterranean. 

Gallatin was compelled reluctantly to sacrifice important 
sources of revenue. The excise tax was particularly odious to 
the Republicans. It had an ugly name among the advocates 
of states' rights. It had caused the Whisky Rebellion and the 
first armed invasion" of a state by the national power. It 
had provoked the Fries riot. It was inquisitorial and bore hard 
on the farmer distiller. Besides, it cost about 20 per cent for 
collection as against 3 per cent for customs duties. Jefferson 
was determined that it should be abolished; and abolished it 
was, in April, 1802, with a loss of a million dollars to the 
Treasury. The repeal of the excise was a genuine self-denying 
ordinance, for it cut down the patronage of the administration 
nearly 50 per cent. 

Gallatin was obliged also to give up the anticipated retrench- 
ments in the Navy Department. The army, to be sure, was 
reduced after the passing of the war scare of 1798 to its meager 
footing in Washington's day, and a beginning was made in the 
curtailment of the navy by stopping the work on six "seventy- 
fours" which had been authorized by Adams's Congress and 
selling off all the warships but thirteen. The remnant of our 
navy Jefferson would have laid up in the eastern branch of 



210 



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the Potomac, where they could be looked after ^'by one set of 
plunderers." But the administration was only a few weeks old 
when the bashaw of Tripoli declared war on the American 
republic. It was the culmination of a sordid business in the 
Mediterranean which had disgraced our government since the 
days of the Confederation. The rulers of the Barbary States 
of the northern African coast — Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and 
Tripoli — had long been in the habit of seizing the ships of 
Christian nations in the Mediterranean and holding the crews 
for heavy ransom. It was a more convenient way of raising 
revenue than the precarious dependence on a corrupt tax- 
gatherer, and it had the further advantage of harrying the 
enemies of Allah. The European nations, even including Eng- 
land, the mistress of the seas, paid tribute to these Moham- 
medan pirates as a cheap substitute for war. Jefferson, in the 
days of his mission to Paris (i 785-1 789), had tried to induce 
the governments of Europe to create a joint naval force to 
police the Mediterranean, and again as Secretary of State he 
had advocated punishing the pirates. But our government fol- 
lowed the example of Europe and sent presents and tribute to 
the deys and bashaws to buy our right to travel on the high 
seas. Under Washington and Adams the tribute we paid to 
the Mediterranean pirates amounted to $2,000,000. But when 
the dey of Algiers compelled the very vessel which was bring- 
ing him tribute (her name was the George Washington I) to 
raise the Algerian flag at her masthead and sail on an errand 
to the Sultan of Turkey, and the bashaw of Tripoli, unsatisfied 
with his meager $80,000 of tribute money, declared war on the 
United States, our patience was exhausted. 

Jefferson sent successive squadrons under Commodores Dale, 
Morris, Preble, and Barron to chastise the Barbary corsairs. 
Devoted as he was to peace and economy, he had always 
advocated a naval force in the Mediterranean as both the most 
humane and the cheapest way of dealing with the pirates, 
writing in 1802 that ^'preserving an erect and independent 
attitude" was even more important than peace. Gallatin hated 
to spare the money for the naval war, but the imposition of 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 211 



a 2^ per cent import duty to create a special ^^Mediterranean 
fund" relieved the Treasury and emphasized the temporary 
character of the expense. Our sailors in the Mediterranean 
added fresh laurels to the fame of the American navy. No deed 
of John Paul Jones in the American Revolution was more 
glorious or daring than the exploit of Lieutenant Stephen 
Decatur, who with a few men ran into the harbor of Tripoli 
in the night of February 16, 1804, boarded the frigate Phila- 
delphia, which had fallen into the hands of the corsairs, over- 
powered her crew, set fire to her hull, and rowed back to his 
ship in the light of the conflagration and of a murderous fire 
from the Tripolitan batteries. The Barbary wars lasted through 
the first administration of Jefferson. But when our government 
finally made peace with Tripoli, on January 3, 1805, ^^oi^ vaore 
honorable terms," as Preble said, ^Hhan any other nation had 
ever been able to command," the sacrifices which we had made 
appeared fully justified. We had not only vindicated the right 
of our vessels to sail the high seas without molestation, but 
incidentally we had rendered the maritime nations of Europe a 
service which they ought long before to have performed for 
themselves, in clearing the pirates out of the Mediterranean. 

While these things were going on abroad the Republicans at 
home were delivering an assault on what they called ^^the 
stronghold of Federalism," namely, the judiciary. A number of 
federal judges were impeached in Pennsylvania. John Picker- 
ing, a judge of a federal district court in New Hampshire, was 
condemned and removed by the Senate on charges of gross 
misconduct, although it was shown that he was suffering from 
insanity and thus not responsible for his behavior. He should 
have been quietly dismissed. On the same day that Pickering 
was condemned the House brought impeachment charges 
against Justice Samuel Chase of the Supreme Court. Chase 
was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a hero of 
the Revolution. He had been appointed to the Supreme Court 
by Washington in 1 796. He was an ardent Federalist and had 
presided with more zeal than prudence over the cases of Re- 
publican editors prosecuted under the Sedition law. He was 



212 



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even guilty of having turned his charges to juries into intem- 
perate pohtical harangues against Repubhcanism as the gov- 
ernment of the mob, which ^yould soon bring ruin upon our 
institutions. These were grave lapses from dignity in a judge 
of the Supreme Court, but they could hardly be classed with 
^'high crimes and misdemeanors"" [like treason or corruption) 
which the Constitution declares a basis for the impeachment 
of federal officers. After an exciting trial, in which John 
Randolph outdid himself in violence and vituperation to secure 
the condemnation which President Jefferson desired as much as 
he. the Senate acquitted Chase, on ]\Iarch i, 1805. and impeach- 
ment of judges for political reasons came to an end. 

However, it was not for its political reforms or financial 
economies, not for the victory over the pirates or the contests 
with Federalists at home, that Jefferson's first administration 
was chiefly distinguished, but for its extension of our national 
domain. Jefferson was an expansionist. His interest in the 
country west of the Alleghenies, and even in the great wilder- 
ness be\^ond the ^Mississippi, was constant from the earliest 
days of the republic. It was he who had drafted the Ordinance 
of 1784 for the government of the Western territory, and by 
the adoption of many of his ideas three yedLVs later in the famous 
Northwest Ordinance, had set the impress of his genius on a 
policy of territorial government which was to endure for a 
century. "When he was on the Paris mission (i 785-1 789) he 
had encouraged a New England traveler named Ledyard to 
cross Siberia and the Pacific and return to the United States 
through the vast unexplored territory of the Spaniards to the 
west of the ^Mississippi. When the Nootka Sound controversy 
arose between England and Spain in 1790 (see page 169) he 
showed himself the most anxious member of Washington's 
cabinet for the safeguarding of our interests in the West. He 
regarded the English settlements on the Atlantic coast as ^'the 
nest from which America north and south was to be peopled" 
and foresaw a republic of a hundred million in the great western 
continent. He had not been in the presidency ten weeks before 
news came from our minister in London, Rufus King, of a 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 213 



transaction in Europe that was destined to have an incalculable 
influence on our history. Napoleon Bonaparte, on the day after 
he had concluded the convention of peace with the United 
States (see page 183), had compelled the king of Spain to sign 
the treaty of San Ildefonso ceding to him the entire province 
of Louisiana (October i, 1800). Spain is ceding Louisiana 
to France/' wrote Jefferson to Robert Livingston at Paris, ^'an 
inauspicious circumstance to us." 

The circumstance was inauspicious for several reasons. It 
meant the establishment of the strongest and richest of the 
European countries as a colonial power on our borders, and 
perhaps in control of the Gulf of Mexico and the islands com- 
manding its entrance. It meant the substitution of the restless 
and unpredictable ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte in the 
Western Hemisphere for the supine and dilatory policy of the 
court of Spain. It meant the control of the Mississippi, through 
the possession of New Orleans, by a power no more friendly 
than Spain to the United States, but infinitely more able to 
paralyze our commerce on the great river. Since the few thou- 
sands of pioneers had followed Boone, Sevier, Harrod, and 
Robertson across the mountains in the days of the Confeder- 
ation, our Western settlements had grown apace. The opening 
of the nineteenth century saw some 50,000 farmers established 
in the rich bottom lands along the Ohio River and its northern 
tributaries. A hundred thousand immigrants had beaten the 
buffalo paths and Indian trails of Tennessee into pack roads 
and begun clearing the hickory and sycamore forests for their 
corn and tobacco, their hogs and cattle. Over 2oo,ocx) had 
gone into Kentucky. The outlet for the increasing products 
of all this ^'back country" was the great river. ^^The Missis- 
sippi is everything to them," wrote Madison in 1802 ; ^4t is 
the Hudson, the Potomac, the Delaware, and all the navigable 
rivers of the Atlantic coast formed into one." After a dozen 
years of tedious negotiation with the Spanish court we had, in 
1795, obtained a treaty giving us the right of deposit and 
transshipment at New Orleans. The customhouse books of 
1802 showed exports from the port of New Orleans of over 



214 



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$3,000,000 of sugar, $1,000,000 of cotton, 200,000 lb. of 
tobacco, nearly 10,000 bbl. of flour, besides large amounts 
of cordage, cider, apples, bacon, pork, and lead. Most of the 
articles, except the sugar and cotton, came from the settle- 
ments up the river, Kentucky and Tennessee alone sending over 
$1,600,000 of produce through the port. Out of 267 vessels 
clearing from New Orleans in the year 1802 there were 158 
American as against 104 Spanish. Seagoing ships had even 
begun to be built at Pittsburgh and had successfully made 
the trip from the upper Ohio to Liverpool. The attachment of 
the Western states to the Union depended on the guarantee 
of their commerce, and this guarantee depended on the control 
of the Mississippi. If the river was not in our hands, at least 
it must be in the hands of a power with whom we could deal 
on equal terms. Jefferson recognized this when he declared 
that New Orleans was the one point on the American continent 
whose possession was of vital importance to the United States 
and wrote to our minister in Paris that the moment France 
should take possession of the port ^Ve must marry ourselves 
to the British fleet and nation." 

While we were anxiously awaiting developments in Louisiana, 
and Napoleon, now firmly fixed on the throne of France and 
for the first and only moment of his meteoric career at peace 
with all the nations of Europe, was preparing to launch his 
colonial enterprise in earnest, an event occurred which made 
decided action on our part necessary. On October 16, 1802, 
acting on orders from Madrid, Morales, the Spanish intendant 
at New Orleans, withdrew the right of deposit granted in the 
treaty of 1795 and thus closed the Mississippi to a trade that 
already amounted to 40 per cent of our exports. Whether or 
not this hostile decree was promulgated at the behest of Napo- 
leon, coming as it did on the eve of his preparation to take 
possession of Louisiana, it was a sinister evidence of the amount 
of consideration that our river trade might expect from the 
despot of France. It was clear that we must make every effort 
to get possession of the island of New Orleans. Jefferson asked 
Congress for $2,000,000 to be used at the discretion of the 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 215 



executive for negotiations with Napoleon. He nominated James 
Monroe as envoy extraordinary to act with our ministers, 
Robert R. Livingston at Paris and Charles Pinckney at Madrid, 
in securing the interests of the United States in Louisiana.^ 
Monroe's instructions were vague, hardly more than an expres- 
sion of unlimited confidence in his discretion; but in letters 
both to him and to Livingston Jefferson emphasized the tre- 
mendous importance of the mission: ^^The future destinies of 
our country hang upon the event of this negotiation," he 
wrote. Monroe sailed for France in the middle of January, 
1803, while the Federalists in Congress were trying to embar- 
rass Jefferson and outbid the administration in popularity with 
the Western settlers by advocating the immediate seizure of 
Louisiana by force. 

But relief in the tense situation came neither from Living- 
ston's entreaties nor from Monroe's inducements, but from 
Napoleon himself. The peace of Amiens with England was 
wearing thin. The destiny of the First Consul was war and 
not peace. ^'My fate is to be ever in arms," he said to the 
Austrian minister Metternich. The prospect of building a dis- 
tant colonial empire suddenly lost its charms. The advance 
guard of 12,000 soldiers whom he had sent under his brother- 
in-law, General Leclerc, for the conquest of Santo Domingo 
had succumbed to the attack of Toussaint L'Ouverture's ne- 
groes and to the deadlier attack of the yellow fever. Napo- 
leon abandoned the Louisiana project as abruptly as he had 
conceived it. On the very day that Monroe landed at Havre 
the First Consul ordered his minister of finance, Barbe-Marbois, 
to offer Livingston not New Orleans alone but the entire prov- 
ince of Louisiana for 50,000,000 francs. Livingston, who had 
been trying in vain to persuade Napoleon to sell a part of 

lEven Jefferson was cured of any idea of French sympathy for us when 
Napoleon, in the summer of 1802, assumed the robe of monarchy under the title 
of Consul for life and began to abolish all signs of republicanism. Jefferson 
wrote to Livingston in October, ''We stand completely corrected of the error 
that either the government or the nation of France has any remains of friend- 
ship for us." 



2l6 



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Louisiana, was dumfounded by this offer of the whole.'^ He 
and Monroe discussed the matter with Marbois (who set the 
price at 100,000,000 francs instead of 50,000,000 as he had 
been ordered), and after some hagghng they agreed on the 
figure of 60,000,000, together with the assumption of claims 
by the United States to an amount not exceeding 20,000,000 
francs, making the total price 80,000,000 francs, or some 
$14,500,000. The three negotiators set their names to the 
treaty on May 2, 1803,^ and as they rose to shake hands Living- 
ston remarked: ^^We have lived long, but this is the noblest 
work of our whole lives. From this day the United States take 
their place among the powers of the first rank." 

When the Louisiana treaty reached Washington in mid- 
summer, it was Jefferson's turn to be surprised. He had sent 
Monroe to purchase New Orleans, with West Florida if pos- 
sible, for not more than $10,000,000. Now came a bill half 
again as large for the whole of Louisiana — a tract which 
doubled the area of the United States. There was no doubt 
that it was an excellent bargain ; but aside from the charge im- 
posed on the government (a charge exceeding our total annual 
revenue), there were points in the treaty to give an advocate 
of strict construction much uneasiness. There was no provi- 
sion of the Constitution authorizing the executive to purchase 
foreign territory and to covenant that the inhabitants of such 
territory should be brought into the Union and admitted to 
the enjoyment of all the rights of American citizens. Jefferson 
himself was the first to admit that he had ^^done an act beyond 
the Constitution." He prepared an amendment to submit to 

^The astute Talleyrand, who for some reason had not been intrusted by 
Napoleon with the negotiations for the sale of Louisiana, nevertheless knew of 
the First Consul's intention and in a private capacity anticipated Marbois in 
asking Livingston (before Monroe's arrival in Paris) how much the United 
States would give for the whole of Louisiana. Jefferson apparently had little 
hope that Napoleon would part with any of Louisiana. It is a queer coinci- 
dence that on the very day on which the treaty of cession was dated (April 30, 
1803) he wrote to John Bacon that he was "not sanguine in obtaining a cession 
of New Orleans for money," 

2 The treaty was dated back to April 30, 1803, 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 217 



Congress, so that the states might ratify the purchase through 
their legislatures or conventions. But before the meeting of 
Congress, Monroe advised him from Paris that Napoleon might 
change his mind if there were any delay in the ratification of 
the treaty and the appropriation of the purchase money by 
Congress. So, comforted by the assurances of his friend 
Nicholas that the treaty-making power of the executive and 
the Senate was unlimited and that new states could be admitted 
out of newly acquired territory as well as out of the existing 
territory of the United States, Jefferson cast the proposed 
aniendment behind him^ asking Congress at the same time to 
cast ^'metaphysical subtleties" behind them and to support 
him in his action as they would support a guardian who had 
acted beyond his authority for the good of his ward. The 
author of the Kentucky Resolutions appealed to the good sense 
of the nation, and the nation was with him. The Federalist 
minority in Congress objected to the treaty from every point 
of view : it contravened the Constitution by giving the port of 
New Orleans advantages not shared by other ports of the 
country ; it usurped the power of Congress by regulating trade ; 
the payment of so large a sum of money to a belligerent nation 
was virtually a breach of neutrality ; the title of France to the 
province of Louisiana was not clear ; and all that we had bought 
at this huge price was 'Hhe authority to make war on Spain." 
But opposition was unavailing. The Senate immediately rati- 
fied the treaty by a vote of 24 to 7, and a few weeks later the 
House voted the funds in the form of an issue of $11,250,000 
in 6 per cent stock (89 to 23). There was no doubt of the 
popularity of the Louisiana Purchase. 

There were grave irregularities in the transaction. Napoleon 
had not yet fulfilled his part of the Treaty of San Ildefonso 
with Spain when he sold us Louisiana, and the Spanish authori- 
ties were still in command at New Orleans. Moreover, Napoleon 
had promised Spain never to transfer the province to a foreign 
power, and the French Constitution forbade the First Consul 
to alienate any of the land of the Republic. In short, in buying 
Louisiana from Napoleon we were, as Professor Channing says, 



2l8 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



acting as ^Hhe accomplices of the greatest highwayman of the 
age." But we took the ground that the delinquencies of France 
toward Spain could not invalidate the good faith of our dealing 
with France; and Spain, after a first violent protest, acqui- 
esced in the transaction — with her own interpretation of the 
boundaries of Louisiana. 

These boundaries, even in the limited form finally fixed by 
the treaty of 1819 with Spain, inclosed a magnificent domain 
extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border and 
from the Mississippi to the Rockies. Fourteen states or parts 
of states have been made from that domain, in which the value 
of the farm lands alone a century after the purchase was more 
than a thousand times as great as the price paid for the whole 
province. The white inhabitants of this domain have increased 
from 50,000 in 1804 to more than 20,000,000. In abundance and 
variety of products it is the richest developed area in the world. 
And the original cost of its 875,000 square miles was about 
three cents an acre I ^ On November 30, 1803, Louisiana was 
finally handed over to the French intendant Laussat by the 
Spanish authorities at New Orleans, and twenty days later the 
French tricolor was hauled down and the Stars and Stripes 
were raised in its place. 

If the Constitution was strained in the purchase of Louisiana, 
the Declaration of Independence was violated in its govern- 
ment. By a law of March 26, 1804, Congress separated the 
more densely populated part of the province, south of latitude 
33°, as the territory of Orleans and handed over its admin- 
istration completely to President Jefferson. He was to appoint 
the governor, the legislative council, and the judges. He simply 

lit is interesting to compare this with the price paid for other portions of 
our public domain. The Mexican cession cost 4^ cents an acre and Florida 
17 cents an acre — both in addition to the expense of wars. We paid Texas 
26 cents an acre for the land surrendered to the United States in 1850, and 
three years later we gave Mexico 34 cents an acre for the Gadsden Purchase. 
Altogether, the average cost of our public lands (including surveys and the 
extinction of Indian titles) has been 17^ cents an acre, and we have sold them 
(exclusive of millions of acres given to railroads, educational institutions, and 
homesteaders) at prices ranging from 66| cents to $5 an acre. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 219 



stepped into the place of King Charles of Spain" as the 
absolute ruler of the province. Such principles as government 
by the consent of the governed, popular control over officials, 
trial by jury, no taxation without representation, were ignored. 
Edward Livingston, a younger brother of the minister at Paris, 
had moved to the province immediately after the purchase, to 
engage in the practice of law. He wrote a petition for the 

planters, merchants, and other inhabitants of Louisiana," 
protesting against the law of March 26, and demanding ^Hhe 
rights and privileges of American citizens" promised in the 
treaty. "Were the patriots who composed your councils [in 
the days of the Revolution] mistaken in their political prin- 
ciples?" he pertinently asks. "Do political axioms on the 
Atlantic become problems when transferred to the shores of the 
Mississippi ? . . . Many of us are native citizens of the United 
States. . . . For our love of order and submission to the laws 
we can confidently appeal to the whole history of our settle- 
ment. . . . Annexed to your country by political events, it 
depends on you to determine whether we shall pay the cold 
homage of reluctant subjects or render the free allegiance of 
citizens." Livingston's petition induced Congress to amend the 
law by empowering the governor of the territory to convene a 
legislative assembly of twenty-five members and allowing the 
territory to send a delegate to Congress. It was not, however, 
until the admission of the territory of Orleans into the Union 
as the state of Louisiana in 181 2 that its inhabitants received 
the full rights and immunities of American citizens which had 
been promised to them in the treaty. 

The Louisiana Purchase gave rise to a boundary dispute 
which was settled by the diplomatists in 181 9, but which has not 
yet ceased to be a subject for controversy among the historians. 
We took Louisiana from France "with the same extent that it 
now has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France 
possessed it, and such as it should be after the treaties subse- 
quently entered into between Spain and the other states." But 
this was anything but clear. "When France possessed it" (that 
is, down to 1763) Louisiana included West Florida eastward 



2 20 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

to the Perdido River, but all of Florida had been ceded to Eng- 
land by the treaty of 1763 and had remained English for twenty 
years. When Spain got it back, therefore, by the treaty of 
1783, it was from England and not from France that she re- 
ceived it. It hardly seems, therefore, that West Florida could 
have been fairly comprised in the Louisiana ^^retroceded" by 
Spain to France in 1800. Moreover, neither Napoleon who 
sold, nor IMonroe and Livingston who bought, Louisiana beHeved 
that it included Florida. Napoleon was still trying in 1802 to 
persuade King Charles IV to add the Floridas to the bargain of 
San Ildefonso, and IMonroe was on the point of starting for 
Madrid after the purchase of 1803 to buy the Floridas from 
Spain for an additional million or two, when the French court 
dissuaded him. On the other hand, the French authorities 
claimed that the whole of Texas was included in Louisiana. 
General Victor, who was preparing to sail from Dunkirk in the 
spring of 1803, was instructed to take possession as far west and 
south as the Rio Grande, and Talleyrand wrote to the minister 
of the marine that ^'the Rio Bravo [Rio Grande] from its mouth 
to the 30th degree" was the ^Uine of demarkation." Laussat, the 
French intendant at New Orleans, wrote explicitly to Madison 
that Louisiana ^'did not comprehend any part of West Florida," 
but that it extended ^Svestwardly to the Rio Bravo, otherwise 
called the Rio del Norte." In spite of all this testimony, Jef- 
ferson was bound to have West Florida. He persuaded himself 
by researches in the history of Louisiana during the summer of 
1803 at Monticello that West Florida was rightly ours, and the 
next year he got Congress, in spite of angry protests from the 
Spanish minister at Washington, to erect the shores and waters 
of IMobile Bay into a United States customs district. To the 
end of his administration he was laboring with Napoleon to 
bring pressure to bear on Spain to recognize the rightful 
boundaries" of Louisiana. 

Besides doubling the area of our country by an immensely 
valuable domain and giving rise to many important political 
and diplomatic questions, the Louisiana Purchase had the 
further effect of stimulating our interest in the great Western 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 221 



wilderness which stretched two thousand miles from the Mis- 
sissippi to the Pacific coast. Jefferson was, as we have seen, an 
ent-husiastic advocate of expansion. In 1783 he had suggested 
to George Rogers Clark, the hero of Vincennes, that he form a 
party "to explore the country from the Mississippi to Califor- 
nia." Now, twenty years later, he asked Congress for an appro- 
priation of $2500 "to send intelligent officers with ten or twelve 
men to explore even to the western ocean" and to study the 
Indian tribes, the botany, geology, and zoology of the country. 
To be sure, the expedition would pass through territory belong- 
ing to the king of Spain, but it might be represented as "a 
literary pursuit" ( ! ) and would give no offense on account of 
"the expiring state of the Spanish interests there." The appro- 
priation was made, and Jefferson selected his private secretary, 
Meriwether Lewis, to lead the expedition, with William Clark, 
the younger brother of George Rogers Clark, for his lieutenant. 
Before the expedition started, in the spring of 1804, from the 
mouth of the Missouri River, Louisiana had become our prop- 
erty ; but the land beyond the Rockies still belonged to Spain 
up to the forty-second parallel of latitude, and north of that 
was claimed by both England and the United States. The Lewis 
and Clark expedition, as described in the diaries of several of 
the men who participated in it, is one of the most fascinating 
chapters of our early history. The company ascended the 
Missouri River to its source, then, crossing the "great divide," 
struck the upper waters of the Columbia River and reached the 
"roaring ocean" in the autumn of 1805. Wintering at the 
mouth of the Columbia, they returned by practically the same 
route as they had gone out, and reached St. Louis in September, 
1806. The expedition established our best claim to the Oregon 
region in our later dispute with England.^ 

^Our earlier claim to the region was based on the discovery of the Columbia 
River by Captain Gray in 1792, While Lewis and Clark were on their travels 
Captain Zebulon Pike, seeking the sources of the Mississippi, explored to a point 
several miles above the Falls of St. Anthony, when he was hindered by deep 
snows. The following year he explored the Southwest from the Arkansas River 
to the Spanish settlements on the Rio Grande. Pikes Peak in Colorado is 
his monument. 



222 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Meanwhile Jefferson had been triumphantly reelected over 
his Federalist opponent C. C. Pinckney. The irreconcilable 
Federalists of New England, led by Pickering, Griswold, and 
Sedgwick, were ready, in their opposition to the "lordlings of 
the South," to break up the Union. The addition of Louisiana, 
with the promise of incorporation into the Union, meant the 
end of New England's aristocratic leadership in Congress 
and eventual domination by the Southern planters, supported 
by ^'Creoles and halfbreeds" from the ^Vestern Scythia." Burr 
was sounded with the purpose of bringing New York into 
a projected Western confederacy, and the unprincipled Vice 
President, whom Jefferson had refused to honor in the distribu- 
tion of the patronage, joined the plot and accepted Federalist 
support in his candidacy for the governorship of New York in 
the spring of 1804. But Burr was defeated in 1804, as he had 
been in 1801, by the efforts of Alexander Hamilton. Repub- 
lican electors were chosen in every state of the Union except 
Connecticut and Delaware, and the Jeffersonian policies were in- 
dorsed by an electoral majority of 162 votes to 14. The only 
result of the Federalist plot of disunion was the loss of their most 
distinguished leader, Alexander Hamilton, whom Burr slew in 
revenge in a duel on Weehawken Heights (July 11, 1804). 

The first administration of Thomas Jefferson was successful 
in every respect. Our foreign commerce grew so rapidly that 
Gallatin's estimates of customs receipts were far outstripped. 
Except for what Jefferson called ^'bickerings with Spain," our 
relations with foreign countries were satisfactory. The great 
Louisiana bargain seemed to have cemented a lasting friend- 
ship with France. The commissioners under the Jay Treaty 
satisfied the British merchants by awarding them $2,664,000 
in payment of the long-standing debts from American citizens. 
The English government was so well pleased to see Napoleon's 
colonial design defeated in the western continent that they 
allowed Baring Brothers to advance cash on the Louisiana stock 
voted by Congress. Our Western country was beginning to 
fill up. Nearly 10,000 emigrants had gone into the new Missis- 
sippi Territory established in 1798, Ohio, with a population 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 



223 



of 55,000, was admitted to the Union as the seventeenth 
state in November, 1802. In January, 1805, the territory of 
Michigan was set off from the Indian Territory. 

By an act of March 10, 1800, Congress had established land 
offices on the Ohio frontier for the sale of public lands in small 
parcels to the emigrant at two dollars an acre with liberal 
credit — a sure sign that the small farmer was beginning to re- 
place the hunter, the ranger, and the speculator on our frontier. 
Emigrants already began to swarm on the main routes to the 
Western country — across the Massachusetts and Connecticut 
Berkshires, up the Mohawk valley to the frontier trading-post at 
Buffalo, through the Wyoming valley of Pennsylvania to Pitts- 
burgh and thence down the Ohio, from Baltimore via the 
Potomac and Braddock's road to the Monongahela, from Vir- 
ginia and the Carolinas through the Cumberland Gap to the 
rich lands of Kentucky and Tennessee, or far to the south, past 
the dwindling hills of the Appalachian range, into the fertile 
territory finally ceded to the government by the state of Georgia 
in 1802. Although we had little as yet to boast of in arts and 
letters, the democratic revolution was preparing the stage for 
a distinctly American type of genius as compared with the 
Anglo-American of the colonial days. Newspapers were multi- 
plying rapidly, and, although our people were still so interested 
in politics and so vociferous in their discussions that Salmagundi 
called the government of the United States ^'a logocracy," still 
the scurrility that disgraced our press in the days of Washington 
and Adams had largely disappeared. The New York Evening 
Post and the National Intelligencer of Washington were most 
respectable substitutes for Freneau's and Fenno's Gazettes. 
Peace, prosperity, political harmony, and unbounded prospects 
of expansion in wealth and numbers were the happy auguries 
for our country when Jefferson took the oath of office for the 
second time, on March 4, 1805. could truly congratulate his 
fellow countrymen that ^'not a cloud appeared on the horizon." 



224 



THE UNITED STATES OF AIMERICA 



The Struggle for Neutrality 

John Randolph of Roanoke, with his inimitable gift for 
epigram, once likened the four years of Jefferson's second 
administration to the seven lean kine in Pharaoh's dream, which 
rose from the river and devoured their seven fat predecessors. 
The simile was apt. From the spring day of 1805 when Jefferson 
delivered his second inaugural address congratulating the coun- 
try and his party on the blessings of prosperity, troubles began 
to brew : schism in the ranks of the Republicans, conspiracies in 
the West, and the massing of new war clouds in Europe, which 
spread their sinister shadow westward across the ocean until 
they reached our shores. The President believed in 1805 that 
the storms which marked his first accession to office were all 
past. He wrote to General Heath in December in a strain of 
rejoicing: ^^The new century opened itself by committing us 
on a boisterous ocean, but all is now subsiding. Peace is 
smoothing our path at home and abroad." Four years later 
he left office, his cherished policy of peaceful coercion defeated, 
his hold on Congress lost, his party disrupted, and his country 
on the verge of war, comforting himself with the gloomy solace 
that ^4t would rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire 
from this station [the presidency] with the reputation and 
favor which bring him into it." 

Quarrels among the Republicans of New York and Pennsyl- 
vania had begun to appear during Jefferson's first term. The 
Livingston and Clinton factions were always in rivalry for the 
control of local offices and poHcy ; and Vice President Burr had 
become so far ahenated from the administration, through having 
been denied what he considered a proper share of the patronage, 
that he had lent himself, as we have seen, to the disunion schemes 
of the New England FederaHsts. A veritable epidemic of im- 
peachment of state judges in Pennsylvania, spread by the perse- 
cuting zeal of William Duane of the Aurora, threw the great 
Republican state of the North into a frenzy of factional strife 
which Jefferson tried in vain to alla}^ These local quarrels 
proved but the prelude to schism and intrigue in the national 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 225 



Congress, which shattered the harmonious relations between 
the Executive and the Houses and reduced the latter to pitiable 
weakness at just the moment when union and strength were nec- 
essary to meet the encroachments of the European belligerents 
on our commerce. 

The man who introduced strife into Congress was John 
Randolph. This highly gifted^ but contentious and abusive, 
son of Virginia, who boasted that the blood of Pocahontas ran 
in his veins, had been displeased from the beginning of Jeffer- 
son's administration with the consideration shown to the North- 
ern states. Conciliation was no part of his poHtical creed. The 
Republicans, he thought, should conduct the government with 
as complete regard to the interests of the agricultural South 
as the Federalists had for the commercial North. There were 
enough able men from Virginia and the Carolinas to advise 
the President without his needing to have recourse to the 
Lincolns and Dearborns and Crowninshields of Massachusetts. 
Randolph conducted the prosecution in the impeachment of 
Justice Chase at Jefferson's express request, and when Chase 
was acquitted by a Senate in which sat 34 Republicans and 
only 10 Federalists, it was proof enough to Randolph that he 
had been left in the lurch by the administration. He was 
through serving Thomas Jefferson. 

Randolph's opportunity for revenge came with the opening 
of Congress in December, 1805. Jefferson had two or three 
political ^'hobbies" on which he insisted, in spite of opposition 
from foes and advice from friends, with a persistence that was 
strange in a man generally so shrewd in political compromise 
and patient in the handling of expedients. One of those hobbies 
was the acquisition of West Florida. He had committed himself 
to the doctrine that the Perdido River was the eastern boundary 
of the Louisiana Purchase^ and for this he labored against the 
flat refusal of Spain to surrender West Florida and the cynical 
indifference of Napoleon to his entreaties to make Spain sur- 
render it. There were matters of far more importance to the 
United States than the possession of a few square miles between 
the Iberville and the Perdido, yet Jefferson seemed even ready 



22 6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



to go to war with Spain over this territory. In his message of 
December 2^ 1805, he recommended the better defense of our 
seaports, the reorganization of our mihtia, the preparation of 
our troops on the jMississippi to resist Spanish ^'aggressions," 
and even hinted at the desirabihty of building ships of the hne. 
Three days later he sent a confidential message to Congress, 
suggesting an appropriation for the purchase of Florida. The 
public message was intended for popular consumption at home 
and abroad — to exhibit the executive as a strong defender of 
American rights and to frighten Spain to part with her province. 
The secret message contained the real plan for getting West 
Florida. Jefferson had worked this same ruse three years earher 
when, under the threat of marrying ourselves to the British 
fleet and nation," he had secured Louisiana from France for a 
price. But the astute President overlooked some very important 
differences in the two situations. We got Louisiana for money 
in 1803 not because we either bullied or bribed Napoleon, but 
simply because Napoleon himself suddenly determined to sell 
Louisiana. The real offer came from him and not from us. But 
in 1805 King Charles had no desire to sell West Florida, and 
Napoleon had no disposition to compel him to do so. In fact, 
on the very day that Jefferson sent his menacing message to 
Congress, Napoleon won the tremendous victory of Austerhtz 
against the combined armies of Austria and Russia and entered 
on that course of conquest of the continent of Europe which 
left him little interest in the disposal of a strip of land along the 
Gulf of Mexico. From the year 1806 on, while Jefferson and 
]\Iadison were still flattering themselves that they could bring 
^'pressure" to bear on Napoleon by diplomacy or the threat of 
commercial discrimination to secure us the rightful bound- 
aries" of Louisiana, Napoleon was only using Florida as a bait 
to dangle before our eyes in order to keep us from looking too 
favorably on his great rival England. 

Randolph had been a party to the game of threat-and-purchase 
in 1803, but now he threw himself into violent opposition. 
He was chairman of the Ways and ]\Ieans Committee. When 
Jefferson's request for $2,000,000 to buy Florida was read to 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 227 



the House, he declared that he would have no part in delivering 
the public purse ^'to the first cutthroat who demanded it." The 
inconsistency of appropriating money to buy a province which 
we insisted that we had bought three years before furnished a 
fine topic for his sarcasm. Although he had no more intention 
of proceeding to war than Jefferson, he adopted the belligerent 
tone of the first message and moved that troops should be raised 
to protect our southern frontier. Jefferson had to choose be- 
tween the rupture of his party in Congress and the abandon- 
ment of his plan to purchase West Florida. He clung to his 
hobby and got his $2,000,000. But the vote in the House, which 
was composed of 112 Republicans and 27 Federalists, showed a 
majority of only 22 for the bill, and the $2,000,000 remained 
still untouched when Jefferson went out of office. Randolph's 
faction — called the ^'Quids'' — was not numerous. The Presi- 
dent affected to ignore them, once calling them ^^3 or 4 in 
number and all tongue"; but, for all that, their brilliant leader 
was a thorn in the side of the administration. The habit of 
opposition grows by what it feeds on. It was enough hence- 
forth for any measure to have the support of Thomas Jefferson 
to insure its opposition by John Randolph. 

Randolph had his hobby, too. The word Yazoo " threw him 
into a rage like King Henry's when he heard the name of 
Mortimer. The state of Georgia claimed the land west to the 
Mississippi River under its colonial charter. In 1795 the legis- 
lature of Georgia sold 50,000,000 acres near the Mississippi and 
Yazoo Rivers to the Yazoo land companies at an average price 
of one and one-half cents an acre. It was a corrupt transaction 
by a corrupt legislature most of whose members were in the 
deal. The people of the state indignantly turned the legislature 
out at the next election, and the bills of sale to the Yazoo com- 
panies were rescinded. There was no provision made, how- 
ever, for the innocent purchasers of land from the companies. 
Both Adams and Jefferson were petitioned to secure redress 
from the state of Georgia, but nothing was done until 1802, when 
the state surrendered to the Union its Western claims. Then 
the United States inherited the Yazoo controversy. Jefferson 



228 



THE UNITED STATES OF AIMERICA 



appointed three of his cabinet members — Madison, Gallatin, 
and Lincoln — to devise an adjustment, and they recommended 
the appropriation of 5,000,000 acres of public land in the terri- 
tory of Mississippi to satisfy the bona fide claims of the pur- 
chasers from the Yazoo companies. Randolph opposed the 
measure with frantic violence every time that it came up in the 
House. There was no epithet in his choice vocabulary of slander 
that w^as too severe for a Yazoo man." The innocent and the 
guilty were condemned together. A blameless purchaser in 
Pennsylvania or New England was an accomplice of the Yazoo 
speculator. Year after year Randolph killed the bills for the 
relief of Yazoo buyers, even after the Supreme Court, in 
the decision of Fletcher vs. Peck (1810), had pronounced the 
Georgia repealing act a violation of contract and hence null 
and void. It was only when Randolph failed to be returned 
from his congressional district in the election of 1812^ that the 
settlement of the Yazoo claims was finally pushed through 
Congress. 

Another figure of ill omen for Jefferson's second term ap- 
peared in the scene of ]\Iarch i, 1805, in the Senate chamber. 
When the vote was announced clearing Justice Chase of the 
impeachment charges, xAaron Burr rose from the president's 
chair and with a smile and a bow conveyed his congratulations 
to Jefferson's intended victim. Three days later Burr left the 
vice presidency to engage on a career of treasonable adventure 
which reads more like the romance of ^'Rupert of Hentzau" 
than a chapter in the history of our infant West. Burr's poHti- 
cal ambition was great, and it was frustrated at every point. 
Intrigues with the Federahsts in 1801 and 1804 had ruined him 
with the Republicans, and the slaying of the great Federalist 
leader had made him an object of hatred not only to the follow- 
ers of Hamilton but to all respectable Americans. He was a man 
without a party and almost a man w^ithout a country. All that 

^By a kind of "poetic justice" it was Jefferson's son-in-law, John Eppes, who 
defeated Randolph in this election. The erratic Virginian was absent from Wash- 
ington, however, for a single term only. He was returned to the House in the 
election of 1814 and remained there fifteen years longer. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 229 



remained to him was his restless spirit of selfish ambition. He 
turned to the West to build up his fortunes anew. Just what he 
intended to do in the Mississippi Valley we do not know, and it 
is probable that Burr himself did not know. His plans shifted as 
his prospects changed. Some historians believe that he plotted 
the detachment of the trans-Allegheny country from the Union, 
some that he aimed at the conquest of New Orleans as a capital 
for a great Western state including Louisiana and Texas, some 
that he dreamed of invading Spanish territory to the south and 
setting up the empire of a new Montezuma in Mexico. How- 
ever these grandiose schemes may have played through his 
mind, one thing is certain: he collected men, money, and arms 
beyond the mountains for use either against the United States 
or against a friendly neighboring power. This was his treason. 

Burr knew the dissatisfaction in Louisiana caused by the act 
of Congress of 1804. He talked with the delegates who brought 
Livingston's protesting petition to Washington in December 
and was confirmed in his belief that Louisiana was ripe for 
rebellion. In the summer of 1805 he approached the British 
minister Anthony Merry with an appeal for $500,000 and a 
supporting squadron in the Gulf of Mexico from England, in 
return for which the parts of the new empire wrested from Spain 
were to be opened to British trade. Failing to get a response 
from England, he turned to Spain, representing to her minister 
at Washington, d'Yrujo, the great advantage of creating a 
strong state under friendly rule between Mexico and the hostile 
republic of America. He got Si 0,000 out of d'Yrujo before 
that gullible gentleman received word from Spain to have 
nothing to do with his schemes. This threw Burr entirely on 
such allies as he could find in the West, and by what must have 
been rare powers of persuasion he enlisted the sympathy and 
support of various persons — the rich Irishman Blennerhassett 
in his island ^'castle" on the Ohio; James Wilkinson, the 
double-dyed traitor in command of the United States troops in 
Louisiana; Andrew Jackson, major general of the militia of 
Tennessee ; Daniel Clark, a wealthy merchant of New Orleans ; 
and a number of less important persons. But there was too 



230 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



much talk and too little money for a successful conspiracy. 
When Burr was finally ready to start down the Ohio from 
Blennerhassett's island, in December, 1806, it was not as a 
conqueror with an ^'army,'' as he had boasted, but as a fugitive 
from justice with sixty or eighty followers hastily embarked in 
a few boats. 

For President Jefferson had at last heeded the rumors of 
conspiracy which had been coming to him for over a year, and 
on November 27, 1806, issued a proclamation for the arrest 
of sundry persons'^ who were "conspiring to set on foot 
a military enterprise against the dominions of Spain." Burr 
eluded the proclamation and kept on his way till he reached the 
neighborhood of Natchez, on the lower Mississippi, where he 
learned that Wilkinson had betrayed him. Giving up his case 
as lost and sinking his arms in the river, he surrendered to the 
governor of the territory of Mississippi ; then broke his parole 
and, disguised as a woodman, struck across the territory for 
the Spanish province of Florida. He was seized near Fort 
Stodert (Alabama) and sent to Richmond for trial on the 
charge of treason in levying war against the United States. 

The eyes of the whole country were fixed on Richmond when 
the trial commenced in August, 1807. Jefferson was eager for 
Burr's condemnation. He wrote a dozen letters to George Hay, 
the prosecuting attorney of the district of Virginia, spurring 
him on to the assault. But the foes of Jefferson were in the 
ascendant. Chief Justice Marshall presided as judge, and he 
delegated as foreman of the jury another Virginian even more 
hostile to the President; namely, John Randolph of Roanoke. 
Marshall instructed the jury carefully as to what constituted 
the "overt act'' necessary to convict a person of treason, and 
warned them against admitting "any testimony relative to the 
conduct or the declarations of the prisoner elsewhere and 
subsequent to the transactions on Blennerhassett's island," 
which was equivalent to an instruction to bring in a verdict of 
"not guilty." For there was no evidence to show that the men 
collected on the island were there for the purpose of levying 
war on the United States. The court summoned Jefferson to 



THE JEFFERSOXIAX POLICIES 



231 



appear as a witness, and when he indignantly refused to obey 
the summons as inconsistent with the dignity of his office, the 
lawyers for the defense proceeded to heckle his star witness, 
General Wilkinson, until it seemed as though, instead of Aaron 
Burr, he himself were on trial for treason. To Jefferson's great 
humihation and disgust the prisoner was discharged. The polit- 
ical enemies of the administration had trium^phed, and the re- 
venge of John Randolph for the acquittal of Justice Chase was 
complete. Freed from the halter which he richly deserved, Burr 
made his way to France, where he soon gave further proof of 
his treasonable nature;^ and a few years later he returned to 
New York, where he lived in obscure indigence until his death 
in 1836 at the age of eighty. 

Wliile the Burr trial was proceeding at Richmond, an event 
occurred off the Virginia coast which threw the country into a 
state of excitement such as had not been experienced since the 
shots were fired on Lexington Green. The United States frigate 
Chesapeake, Captain Barron commanding, weighed anchor 
from Norfolk in the early evening of June 22, bound for the 
Mediterranean service. Her guns were still unmounted, and 
her decks were littered with tackle. The British ship Leopard 
overhauled her outside the capes and sent an officer aboard her 
with orders from Admiral Berkeley, commanding the British 
squadron in American waters, to come to and be searched for 
British deserters in her crew. When Barron replied that he 
had no deserters aboard, the Leopard came within close range 
and poured a broadside of shot into the Chesapeake, killing or 
wounding twenty-one men. Barron, unprepared to resist, struck 
his colors after firing a single gun lighted by a coal brought 
from the ship's galley. Then the British officers took four 
alleged deserters off the American frigate and left her to crawl 

^In 1810, when Napoleon's insults to our shipping reached their climax in the 
Rambouillet Decree, which confiscated all American vessels that had entered 
French ports after May 20, 1809, Burr addressed a memoire to Napoleon's 
minister of police, Fouche, declaring that "with 100.000 troops and a combined 
attack from Canada and Louisiana, the destruction of the United States was 
certain." 



232 



THE UNITED STATES OF A:MERICA 



back to Norfolk with her rigging torn and her hull riddled by 
solid shot. To understand this ^Yanton attack on an American 
warship by a nation at peace with us, it is necessary to 
review briefly the course of foreign affairs since Jefferson's 
second inauguration. 

Our relations with Great Britain during the decade following 
Jay's Treaty were satisfactor}^, especially as the French revo- 
lutionary wars died down with the close of the centur}^ With 
the advent of a general European peace in 1801 there was 
promise that all our grievances would be adjusted. Rufus King, 
our able minister in London, not only negotiated with the 
friendly Addington ministry the settlement of the debts long 
claimed by British merchants but also reported being well 
on the wa}^ to the adjustment of our boundar}^ disputes and even 
of the vexed question of the impressment of American sailors 
(1803). But Napoleon's aggressions in the neutral republics 
of the Continent (Italy, Switzerland, Holland), whose inde- 
pendence he had promised to respect, brought the rupture of 
the Peace of Amiens and enkindled the w^ar which was to last, 
uninterrupted on the part of Great Britain, until the overthrow 
of the upstart emperor of the French and his final exile to the 
rock of St. Helena. The renewal of the war by England led to 
the renewal of the depredations on our commerce and the de- 
fiance of our rights as a neutral maritime power. Napoleon was 
determined to starve England into submission, and England, 
whose very existence depended on the control of the seas, was 
equally determined to dictate the laws of maritime commerce 
to the world. The severity of this struggle was the barometer 
which marked the fortunes of the American marine. 

At the very opening of Jefferson's second term came ominous 
signs of the new policy of England toward neutrals. The ton- 
nage of American vessels engaged in foreign trade had grown, 
thanks to the constant disturbances in Europe^ from 128.893 
1789 to 922,298 in 1805. Our imports in the same period had 
increased from 820,000,000 to S77.ooo.ooo, and our exports (a 
large part of which consisted of imports from the West Indies 
reexported to Europe) from $23,000,000 to §80,000,000. Nine 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 



233 



tenths of this extensive American commerce was carried on in 
American ships. The Enghsh merchants viewed the enormous 
expansion of the American carrying-trade with jealous alarm 
and brought pressure to bear on the ministry and Parliament to 
check it. Acts of Parliament in 1804 and 1805 opened ports 
of the West Indies to enemy vessels carrying colonial cargoes, 
and allowed even importation of colonial products from 
the Spanish and French islands into England. In the mid- 
summer of 1805 another severe blow was struck at the neu- 
tral carrying-trade by the decision of Sir WilHam Grant, Master 
of the Rolls, in the Court of Appeals in Prize Cases, con- 
demning the ship Essex, which had loaded with a cargo at 
Barcelona, Spain, landed at Salem to pay duties, and then pro- 
ceeded with its cargo to Havana, Cuba. Sir William maintained 
that the landing and payment of duties in America did not 
legalize the voyage, because the cargo was never intended for 
American markets. The final destination of the cargo was the 
only thing to be considered, and the Essex was clearly a neutral 
ship carrying enemy goods to an enemy port. As half of our 
export trade was carried on in these broken voyages," now 
declared illegal by the highest maritime court in the British 
Empire, the dismay of the American merchants and shipowners 
can be imagined.^ British cruisers seized a large number of 
American merchantmen as prizes, and the Admiralty Courts 

^Sir William's decision was all the harder to bear because m an earlier case, 
that of the Polly (1801), Sir William Scott of the Admiralty Court had declared 
that ''landing the goods and paying duties in a neutral country broke the 
continuity of the voyage and thus legalized the trade." But the case of the 
Polly cannot be pleaded against the justice of the Essex decision ; nor is it 
true, as practically every American historian has urged, that the British court 
"reversed" itself in the Essex decision. For (i) the Court of Appeals was higher 
than the Admiralty Court; (2) the Polly paid the duties in the American 
port in good faith, while almost all the Essex's duties were refunded as draw- 
backs; and (3) the Prize Court in 1802 condemned the Mercury for "attempting 
to carry on a trade between Havana and Spain by way of Charleston." The 
Americans were simply taking advantage of favorable circumstances to maintain 
a trade which was contrary to the British Navigation Acts and to the "Rule 
of 1756," which forbade neutrals in time of war to trade with ports which 
wer« closed to them in time of peace. 



234 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



condemned their cargoes. Insurance rates on American ships 
jumped to high figures, and protests were loud in our commercial 
centers against the arbitrary invasion of our neutral rights. 

On October 21, 1805, Great Britain sealed her incontestable 
authority over the control of the sea-borne commerce of the 
world by Lord Nelson's destruction of the combined fleets of 
France and Spain off Cape Trafalgar. A few weeks later 
(December 2) Napoleon won the mastery of the continent of 
Europe by his victory over the allied armies of Austria and 
Russia at Austerlitz. Henceforth it was a mighty duel between 
"the tiger and the shark." Napoleon, without a fleet, still har- 
assed British commerce by privateers and sought, by seizures 
and confiscations in French and allied ports in Europe, to 
frighten neutrals from trading with the British Isles. England, 
mistress of the seas, prescribed the terms on which neutral com- 
merce might be carried on, with the double purpose of enriching 
the British merchants and monopolizing the colonial trade. 

The first Congress of Jefferson's second term met on the 
very day of Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz. So little did the 
President divine the import of the events of the summer and 
autumn of 1805 that he looked on the renewal of hostilities be- 
tween England and France as a favorable omen for the United 
States. Still harping on the acquisition of West Florida, he 
thought that Napoleon's "embarrassment" with his continental 
war made the fitting moment to bring pressure to bear on him to 
force Spain to deliver the province (see page 220). Further- 
more, he believed that our preeminent position as the great 
neutral commerce-carrier of the world was so indispensable to 
both Great Britain and France that by peaceful coercion we 
could keep both the belligerents in the path of justice to America 
simply by manifesting the most impartial justice to them. Our 
merchants too, while not sharing the President's confidence in 
the contagion of good intentions, still hoped that American trade 
would not suffer materially through the restrictions of Napoleon 
or Great Britain. They were indignant over the seizures made 
under the Essex decision ; but, on the other hand, the risk of 
seizure forced freight rates so high, and the price of American 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 



and colonial products rose so rapidly, that the merchant made 
a profit if only one in three of his swift vessels eluded the 
British cruisers and landed her cargo safe in a European port. 
Harking back to the policy of 1774? Jefferson's Congress at- 
tempted to hold Great Britain to the path of justice by passing 
a Nonintercourse Act in April; 1806, excluding a number of 
important articles of British manufacture from our ports after 
the fifteenth of the following November. The threat had no 
effect on England's policy, every month that passed in the 
intensifying struggle between Great Britain and Napoleon 
showing more clearly that the rights of neutrals were swallowed 
up in the voracious demand for victory. 

A succession of Orders in Council of the English king and 
Decrees of the Emperor Napoleon in the years 1806 and 1807 
marked the course of the struggle. In April, 1806, just at the 
moment when our Congress was passing the Nonintercourse 
Act, the British prime minister, Charles James Fox, announced 
a blockade of the coast, rivers, and ports of northern Europe 
from the mouth of the Elbe River in Germany to the harbor of 
Brest at the western extremity of Brittany — a line of 750 miles. 
Napoleon's opportunity for revenge came six months later, 
when he crushed the German army at Jena and entered the 
Prussian capital, Berlin. Thence he issued his famous Berlin 
Decree (November 21, 1806) prohibiting all commerce and cor- 
respondence with the British Isles, declaring every subject of 
England found within the lands which his armies occupied a 
prisoner of war, confiscating all property of English subjects in 
these lands, and ordering the seizure of any vessels coming 
from England or her colonies to the ports under his control. 
This outrageous decree shows the bitterness of the struggle 
between ^Hhe tiger and the shark." England replied in 1807 
(January 7 and November 11) with two Orders in Council for- 
bidding coastwise trade between the ports in the power of 
France or her allies, blockading all ports in Europe from which 
the British flag was excluded, and forcing neutrals to trade with 
Britain's enemies directly through British ports, paying duties on 
certain enumerated articles" (cotton, sugar, tobacco, molasses, 



236 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



rice) which were brought to England for reexportation. Finally, 
Napoleon answered by a Decree from Milan (December 17, 
1807) declaring all ships that paid a tax to the British govern- 
ment or allowed themselves to be searched by British cruisers 
^^denationalized" and ^^good prize." 

These Orders and Decrees, if strictly enforced, would have 
ruined our commerce with Europe, for they left only Russia, 
Sweden, and Turkey open to our ships. Access to these countries 
was controlled by Great Britain through the narrow ways of the 
English Channel and the Strait of Gibraltar. But the Orders and 
Decrees could not in the nature of the case be strictly enforced. 
The flags of all the maritime nations of the Continent had been 
driven from the ocean, leaving America and England as virtu- 
ally the only carriers of commerce. And not even the powerful 
navy of Great Britain was able to keep our swift merchant 
vessels from reaching the forbidden ports of the Continent, 
where handsome profits awaited their successful docking. The 
figures of our foreign commerce for the year 1807, when 
seizures and confiscations were most abundant, are sufficient 
proof of this. Our exports for that year totaled $108,000,000 
and our imports $138,000,000, being the largest volume of 
foreign trade in our history until 1835. The customs revenue 
from our trade in 1806 was $14,667,000, or three times that of 
any year before 1800. The cargoes of American merchantmen 
^'filled the warehouses at Cadiz and Antwerp to overflowing; 
they glutted the markets of Embden and Lisbon, of Hamburg 
and Copenhagen, with the produce of the West Indies and the 
fabrics of the East, and, bringing back the products of the looms 
and forges of Germany to the new world, drove out the manu- 
factures of Yorkshire, Manchester, and Birmingham." The 
134 richly laden American vessels which Napoleon seized by 
the Rambouillet Decree (May 23, 1810) show how little able 
the European antagonists were to ruin our commerce by proc- 
lamations. Indeed, had there been only the economic griev- 
ance of the seizure of our ships and the confiscations of our 
cargoes to exasperate us, we might well have continued to 
protest and profit during the entire war. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 237 



But political offenses accompanied the economic aggression. 
The British merchants besieged Parliament to use every weapon 
to put an end to the competition of our neutral commerce. 
Having swept the navies of France and Spain from the seas, 
the British could not allow those countries still to receive the 
products of their colonies in American bottoms. The British 
navy, hard pressed for men, saw their sailors deserting to the 
decks of American merchantmen, drawn by the attractions 
of higher pay, better food, and milder discipline. Adopting 
the principle that commerce under a neutral flag was ^Var in 
disguise," England redoubled her efforts to paralyze our ship- 
ping. Her cruisers hovered off the coasts from Eastport to the 
St. Marys River, often coming within the three-mile limit and 
even within the capes that guarded our bays and rivers. They 
stopped our vessels, searched our crews, and carried off hun- 
dreds of seamen to serve on British men-of-war. It availed a 
man nothing to show his easily procured certificate of Ameri- 
can naturalization, for the British government did not recog- 
nize the right of one of its citizens to transfer his allegiance 
to another country. The British subjects in the American 
colonies were naturally absolved from their allegiance to the 
crown by the treaty of 1783, and those bona fide American 
citizens the impressment officers were instructed to respect. 
But the officers frequently erred, and naturally never in the 
direction of mistaking a British subject for an American 
citizen. Just how many American citizens were impressed be- 
fore we went to war with Great Britain it is impossible to say. 
But shortly before the outbreak of the war President Madison 
laid before Congress a very detailed report on the subject, show- 
ing 6057 cases of American seamen who had been ^'impressed 
and held in bondage" during the three preceding years/ 

^The sufferings of the impressed sailors appear in plaints which have come 
down to us, A youth named Pindell, held on board the British ship Bellona, 
writes to his father begging for release and saying that he would rather "drown 
himself" than endure his present condition. A veteran of the Revolution, David 
Rumsey, whose son was impressed on a British ship, wrote to the Speaker of 
the House, "If this is all the liberty I have gained, to be bereaved of my 
children in that form and they made slaveS;, I had rather be without it," 



238 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The first sinister effect on American politics of the renewed 
struggle in Europe appeared at the close of the year 1806. In the 
summer of that year James Monroe and William Pinkney had 
been negotiating with the friendly Whig ministry of Fox a 
treaty to replace the Jay Treaty of 1795; which had expired. 
Their instructions were to secure the abandonment of impress- 
ment, reparation for captures made under the Essex ruling, and 
a restoration of our West Indian trade to the status of 1801. 
They had so far modified these instructions as to agree to a 
treaty securing the reopening of the trade, when the news of 
Napoleon's Berlin Decree reached London. Then the British 
negotiators announced that their government would observe 
the treaty only if the United States would pledge themselves to 
resist the execution of the Decree. In other words, we were 
offered a meager and mutilated treaty with Great Britain 
virtually on the condition that we should provoke a war with 
Napoleon. ^'How Monroe and Pinkney could have signed the 
treaty after the communication of this note," says Channing, 
"is one of the mysteries of American history: that his action 
did not put an end to James Monroe's poHtical career is equally 
hard to understand." President Jefferson refused even to lay 
the treaty before the Senate, when it arrived in March, 1807, 
sending back word to the commissioners in London to enter on 
fresh negotiations. 

But long before this mild rebuke reached Monroe and Pink- 
ney all hopes of better terms had vanished. In April, 1807, 
the general elections returned a majority of 200 Tory squires 
to Parhament. George Canning, brilliant, overbearing, sar- 
castic, opinionated, and im_placable, became the Secretary of 
State for Foreign Affairs. The press of England soon took its 
tone from the new government. America was denounced as 
"an insignificant and puny power," which must not be allowed 
"to mutilate Britain's proud sovereignty of the ocean." Britan- 
nia ruled the waves, and there should be no neutrals! "From 
the moment Mr. Canning and his party assumed power," says 
Henry AdamS; "the fate of Mr. Jefferson's administration was 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 239 



sealed. . . . England was determined to recover her commerce 
and take back her seamen, and America had no alternative but 
submission or war, . . . equally fatal to Mr. Jefferson's admin- 
istration. Canning cared little which course she took, but he 
believed she would submit." The cabinet was already planning 
the Order in Council which was to close most of the ports of 
Europe to American trade. 

Such was the unpromising state of our relations with England 
when the attack on the Chesapeake occurred, on the same day 
that the new Tory Parliament met at Westminster. War seemed 
inevitable. Even from New England, where there was always 
the most ready disposition to put a favorable interpretation on 
the acts of the British ministry, came threatening words. John 
Quincy Adams believed that Downing Street had decided on 
hostilities." Jefferson issued a proclamation excluding British 
warships from the waters of the United States, and began to 
make arrangements for the disposition of gunboats to protect 
our ports and to call out militia for the defense of the Canadian 
border. He dispatched the armed schooner Revenge to England 
with orders to Monroe to demand an apology and reparation for 
the attack on the Chesapeake, and called Congress to meet on 
October 26, when time had been given for passions to cool and 
for a reply to be received from Canning. In his private corre- 
spondence, which was often a vent for the strong feelings which 
he hesitated to express in his public writings, the President 
sounded a note of defiance against ^'English tyranny bearing 
us down in every point of either honor or interest." He was 
for war ^'unless England did us ample justice in the Chesa- 
peake affair," trusting to the ^^chapter of accidents" for what 
Napoleon might do to us. His fellow Virginian Nicholas wrote 
to Gallatin that forbearance now would be as degrading as 
unqualified submission: ^^But one feeling pervades the nation. 
All distinctions of Federalists and Republicans have vanished. 
The people are ready to submit to any deprivation, and if we 
withdraw within our own shell and turn loose some thousands of 
privateers, we shall obtain in a little time an absolute renunci- 



240 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



ation of the right of search for the purpose of impressment.^ 
A parley will prove fatal. ... I trust in God that the Revenge 
is going out to bring Monroe and Pinkney home." 

Contrary winds kept westward-bound vessels in European 
ports, and it was not until long after Congress had met and 
Hstened to a rather belligerent message from the President that 
news came from the other side. Then, toward the middle 
of December, a fleet of ships landed in rapid succession at 
New York, Norfolk, and Boston bringing a batch of ill news. 
Canning, while ready to discuss the Chesapeake case, haughtily 
refused to abate one jot or tittle of his contention as to the right 
of impressment. Napoleon had begun to enforce the Berlin 
Decree by seizing the American ship Horizon^ driven on the 
French coast in a voyage from England. A new British Order 
in Council (November ii, 1807) had practically closed the 
European continent to our trade. And as an earnest of the way 
in which Great Britain might treat weaker nations which should 
show deference to the will of Napoleon, British warships had 
laid Copenhagen in ruins and carried the whole Danish fleet 
into an English port as a ^^hostage." The moment had come 
to adopt a policy. Submission and war were equally distasteful 
to Jefferson, and, fortified by his persistent belief that our com- 
merce was indispensable to both belligerents, he recommended 
that the United States bring them to terms by cutting off that 
commerce altogether. Every member of his cabinet agreed with 
him. On December 17, 1807, he sent a message to Congress 
urging an embargo on all the foreign commerce of the United 
States. The Senate immediately passed the bill by a vote of 
22 to 6, and four days later the House concurred by a vote of 
82 to 44. Most of the state legislatures too approved the em- 
bargo. In January Congress appropriated $1,000,000 for the 
defenses of ports and harbors; in March it empowered the 
President to call on 100,000 mihtia to serve six months; in 

iJt is interesting to note that this suggestion of withdrawing our merchant 
marine from trade (the embargo policy) was made six months before Jefferson 
actually set it in motion. The figure of "withdrawing within our own shell " fur- 
nished the opponents of the embargo with the nickname of " the terrapin policy." 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 



241 



April it increased the regular army by 6000 men. Altogether 
the military expenses reached about $4,000,000. 

What the political and economic effects of the embargo would 
have been if it had been strictly enforced we cannot say. That 
it was not strictly enforced, in spite of supplementary acts ex- 
tending the authority of the President to the control of practi- 
cally all our coastwise and internal commerce by land and sea, 
is proved by the figures of Gallatin's Treasury reports. Our 
imports and exports, though falling far below the banner year 
of 1807, still totaled $78,000,000 during the embargo year of 
1808, and the receipts into our Treasury for the twelve months 
ending September 30, 1808, were $10,000,000. Pinkney wrote 
to Madison from London that England was feeling the effects 
of the embargo, but that her people did not believe that we 
were sufficiently capable of persevering in self-denial" to 
maintain the policy. How correct this opinion was is shown by 
the rising spirit of protest in our country as the severe measures 
for the enforcement of the embargo succeeded one another 
without bringing the hoped-for concessions from Canning or 
Napoleon. The ultra-Federalists of New England of course 
made political capital of the embargo, which they represented as 
a diabolical scheme of Jefferson and the Virginia lordlings'' to 
ruin the prosperity of their section of the country. They rejoiced 
at the embarrassments of the administration in trying to stop 
the smuggling of beef, flour, pork, potash, and lumber across the 
Canadian frontier. They kept their merchantmen abroad earn- 
ing high freights in the European colonial and coasting trade 
under British licenses. When the President resorted to force to 
carry out the law, ordering Governor Tompkins of New York to 
suppress the smuggling by the militia, they taunted him with the 
practice of that executive tyranny which he had always professed 
to abhor. Worst of all, they made open and boastful profession 
of their attachment to England and their hatred for France. 
Senator Pickering, still their chief, assured Canning's special 
envoy, George Rose, that the embargo could not be enforced, 
that it would soon ruin the party in power, and that the 
Federalists, the friends of England, would soon be in the 



242 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



saddle again. Plans were on foot, as in 1804, for the separation 
of New England from the ^Hyrannous" government of the 
Southern states. 

After a year's experiment with the embargo the farmers were 
everywhere feeling the distress of falling prices, and the re- 
solves of the town meetings were shaking the ground" beneath 
Jefferson's feet. It was evident that further insistence on 
the policy would mean civil strife. Furthermore, England had 
entered the Peninsular War, had freed Portugal from the 
clutches of Napoleon, and, supporting the revolt of the Span- 
iards against the emperor's insane tyranny, had opened to her 
trade the rich markets of the Spanish colonies in America. 
Jefferson yielded, reluctant and unconvinced, to the pressure 
of circumstances.^ On March i, 1809, the Embargo Act was 
repealed, and in its place was substituted a Nonintercourse Act 
with England and France. The President was authorized, in 
case either Great Britain or France ceased to violate the neu- 
tral commerce of the United States, to declare the same by a 
proclamation, after which trade might be renewed with the 
compliant nation. This was the beginning of the end of the 
policy of peaceful coercion." Three days later, smarting under 
the first defeat at the hands of a Congress which he had 
dominated for eight years as no other president in our history 
has done, Jefferson resigned the reins of government to his 
successor, James Madison, and retired to Monticello. 

Jefferson has been rather severely handled by American 
historians. In spite of their recognition of his invaluable serv- 
ices for the cause of our independence, of his correct and vigor- 
ous diplomatic conduct in the French mission and the office of 
Secretary of State, of his magnificent courage in sweeping 
away the political and ecclesiastical survivals in the law code of 
Virginia, of his skill and constancy in the building of a truly 

^Over a year later he wrote to Henry Dearborn that the Federalists in Con- 
gress became panic-stricken and defeated the only policy that could bring Eng- 
land to terms: "They believed in the alternative of repeal or civil war, and 
produced the fatal measure of repeal. This is the immediate parent of all our 
present evils, and has reduced us to a low standing in the eyes of the world." 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 243 



democratic party in the decade of Federalism, they still call 
him ^'weak/' ^Vacillating," insincere/' ^Hricky/' and hold him 
responsible for the unpreparedness of our country for the War 
of 1 81 2 and for the general low tone of our public adminis- 
tration in the period from 1807 to the close of our second war 
with England. This is not the place to enter into a detailed 
defense of Thomas Jefferson's public policy. We may concede 
that he had faults. He clung to hobbies (like the desire for 
West Florida and the belief in gunboats) with an unfortunate 
tenacity. He was often indirect in his methods and dangerously 
near to duplicity in his words. He undoubtedly assumed a 
^Var posture" for the sake of coercion when he had no idea of 
fighting. Yet he was in advance of his Congress in the matter 
of national defense and preparedness. He constantly asked for 
the increase of the militia, with improvements in its classifi- 
cation and mobihzation, for fortifications and seaport defenses, 
which Congress refused to grant.^ The embargo was not a 
capricious invention of Jefferson's to escape from the dilemma 
of war or submission, but a policy suggested by Cary Nicholson 
(see page 240, note), approved by the entire cabinet, passed 
by large majorities in both branches of Congress, and still 
supported, a full year after its passage, by a vote of 64 to 49 in 
the House. And as to a spineless" foreign pohcy, it was Jef- 
ferson's bitterest enemy, John Randolph, who moved in Con- 
gress that it was ^inexpedient to resort to war with Great 
Britain" and ridiculed Madison's statement of the depredations 
of that nation upon our commerce as ^^a shilling pamphlet 
launched against 800 vessels of war." Whether we could have 
avoided the War of 181 2 if Jefferson had not been replaced in 
the White House by the less forceful and less judicious Madison, 
it is impossible to say. But at any rate it was fortunate that the 
war did not come in 1807, when Napoleon was sweeping to the 
climax of his career, but in 181 2, when his power was already 
breaking against the rock of Spanish and Russian resistance. 

^In a letter written October 16, 1814, he attributed the embarrassments of the 
War of 181 2 to the failure of Congress to adopt his recommendations. 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



No one could have foreseen the sinister events of the year 
1807, and the United States could not have been "prepared" 
against them except by the utter abandonment of the policy 
long adopted by all our political leaders. It is pathetic, in the 
light of these events, to read Jefferson's message sent to Con- 
gress in December, 1806, and Gallatin's report of a few months 
later. Our debt had been reduced by $33,580,000, and would 
be wiped out in the course of three years. Then handsome 
surpluses would begin to accrue to the Treasury, which could 
be used for great schemes of national development, "to open new 
channels of communication between the states . . . and to 
cement their union by new and indissoluble ties." Our coasts 
should be surveyed and fortified, a great system of canals should 
connect the Eastern rivers, and roads should be built joining 
them to the navigable headwaters of the Mississippi Basin. The 
first appropriations for the national Cumberland Road were 
actually made. A national university was planned, "to supply 
those sciences which contribute to the improvement of the coun- 
try and some of them to its preservation." These promising 
plans, which show how far Jefferson had advanced on the path 
of nationalism, were rudely interrupted by the alarums of war. 
It was not Jefferson's fault but his misfortune that for the rest 
of his term he had to meet the threats of war with the weapons 
of peace. One crumb of comfort he had in these last distressing 
years of his administration. On the first of January, 1808, the 
law went into effect prohibiting the importation of African slaves 
into the United States. 

James Madison, who was Jefferson's own choice for his suc- 
cessor, was elected over his Federalist opponent, C. C. Pinckney, 
in the embargo year by a vote of 122 to 47. Madison was 
a master of ideas, but not of men. Power slipped from the hands 
of the executive and was contended for by factions in Congress. 
Disaffection entered the cabinet, and confused counsels. Gal- 
latin, the ablest man of the administration, was opposed by the 
inefficient Secretary of State, Robert Smith of Maryland, who 
was supported by a cabal in Congress headed by his wealthy 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 



245 



merchant brother, Senator Samuel Smith. Two years passed 
before Madison summoned the courage and vigor to put an end 
to the strife by replacing Smith with James Monroe. All New 
England except Vermont reverted to the Federalist column. 
The Republican majority was still large in both branches of 
Congress (95 to 46 and 24 to 10), but it was no longer guided 
by the will of Thomas Jefferson. 

For a brief moment at the beginning of Madison^s adminis- 
tration, it looked as though our battle for neutrality through 
diplomatic negotiations might be successful. Whether because 
of the distress to British manufacturers and merchants which 
the embargo brought, or because more compliance was hoped 
for from a president who was suspected by even some of his own 
party of not being v/holly purged of the old leaven of Feder- 
alism, Canning actually proposed a settlement of differences at 
the opening of the year 1809. He instructed David Erskine, the 
British minister at Washington, to offer the withdrawal of 
the Orders in Council on three conditions : ( i ) that we should 
restore commercial intercourse with England while still retain- 
ing the Nonintercourse Act against France ; (2 ) that we should 
accept the ^^Rule of 1756,'' against which we had contended 
ever since the beginning of the war between England and 
France; (3) that we should permit the British navy to seize 
American ships trading with countries which obeyed Napoleon's 
Decrees. Had Erskine communicated the instructions to Robert 
Smith and Madison in extenso, as he was ordered to do by 
Canning, they would have been rejected at once. But Erskine 
was a liberal Whig with an American wife, and in his anxiety 
to restore unity between the two great English-speaking peoples 
he modified" his instructions, representing to Madison merely 
that the Orders would be withdrawn if we reopened intercourse 
with England and refused to do so with France. Madison, 
fully as anxious as Erskine to come to terms, accepted the 
British minister's advances without asking to see his instruc- 
tions, and on April 19, 1809, proclaimed that trade with Great 
Britain might be renewed on the tenth of the following June. 



246 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Our shippers were jubilant, and Madison was praised as a 
statesman by the men who had blamed Jefferson as a bungler/ 
Without waiting for the tenth of June American ships sailed by 
scores to British ports, loaded with cotton, lumber, grain, and 
tobacco. Then came the reckoning. The moment he heard 
that Erskine had exceeded his instructions Canning recalled him 
and disavowed his arrangement, though honorably exempting 
from seizure the American ships that had already sailed on his 
false encouragement. Nothing was left for Madison to do but 
to issue a second proclamation, restoring the Nonintercourse 
Act against Great Britain. The Erskine fiasco left our relations 
with England in a worse state than ever. Nor were matters 
improved when Madison, taking offense at the language of 
Erskine's successor Jackson (which he construed as a charge 
that the American government really knew the contents of 
Erskine's instructions, but persuaded him to violate them), 
notified the British minister that further conversation with him 
would be futile. 

The Nonintercourse Act of March i, 1809, was to expire by 
limitation at the close of the actual session of Congress. With 
the new year (1810) our confused and exasperated legislators 
abruptly changed their tactics. The Treasury report showed 
for the first time a deficit. Our shippers, exalted by the brief 
renewal of commerce, were loath to obey the new restrictions. 
Embargo and nonintercourse had not brought Napoleon and 
Canning to just respect for neutral rights, though they had 
injured our trade and impoverished our Treasury. As John 
Randolph not very elegantly remarked, it was like cutting off 
the toes to cure the corns. A new policy was framed substitut- 
ing enticement for pressure. After much wrangling the House 
agreed, on the first of May, 1810, on Macon's Bill No. 2, which 
opened commerce again with all the world but authorized 
Madison, in case either France or Great Britain should modify 

ijohn Randolph compared "the sound and healthy body of the present ad- 
ministration" to "the dead corpse of the last." Jefferson, though sincerely glad 
to see results of peaceful coercion, was suspicious and warned Madison that the 
terms seemed too good to be true. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 247 



their edicts before March 3, 181 1, in such way ^'as to cease to 
violate the neutral commerce of the United States," to revive 
nonintercourse against the other power. In other words, as 
Schouler says, American influence was put up at auction." 

Napoleon Bonaparte was too shrewd to let the opportunity 
pass without a bid. He had wished since the beginning of hostil- 
ities to embroil England and America. If he could not provoke 
the United States to war, he wanted at least the kind of neu- 
trality which would deprive the English fleet of its commerce. 
The embargo was welcome to him for this reason. The Non- 
intercourse Act was less welcome, because by freeing American 
shipping to the ports not under his control it put that shipping 
at the mercy of the British cruisers. The Macon Bill, finally, 
by restoring American commerce to its status before the em- 
bargo, was hardly less in his eyes than an alliance between the 
United States and England. Without an American fleet to 
protect that commerce or a French fleet to interrupt it, Eng- 
land was again restored to the command of the seas. In this 
extremity he resorted to the trump card of his diplomacy — a 
lie. His foreign minister, the Due de Cadore, addressed a letter 
to our minister at Paris (August 5, 18 10) declaring that ^'the 
decrees of Berlin and Milan are revoked, and that after No- 
vember they will cease to have effect — it being understood that 
in consequence of this declaration the English are to revoke 
their Orders in Council ... or that the United States cause 
their rights to be respected by the English." The letter was 
smeared with honeyed words: ^^His Majesty loves the Amer- 
icans; their prosperity and commerce are within the scope of 
his policy [ ! ] The independence of America is one of the prin- 
cipal titles of glory to France. Since that epoch the Emperor 
is pleased in aggrandizing the United States." The conduct of 
Napoleon since the seizure of the Horizon in 1807 should have 
been sufficient warning to Madison that his promise was as 
empty as his flattery was insulting. By the Bayonne Decree of 
April 17, 1808, he had sequestered all American vessels in his 
ports on the cynical plea that they must be Englishmen in 
disguise, because the embargo forbade American vessels to 



248 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



sail from home! By the Rambouillet Decree of March 23, 
1 810, he ordered all American ships that had entered his ports 
since the previous May to be seized and sold. These confis- 
cations had brought the imperial treasury between $8,000,000 
and $10,000,000, and they were not yet at an end. For on the 
same day that Cadore wrote the letter announcing the with- 
drawal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees Napoleon ordered 
further seizures by the secret Trianon Decree, and spoke of the 
Berlin and Milan Decrees as ^'permanent laws of the Empire."^ 
It was in vain that the marquis of Wellesley, who had suc- 
ceeded Canning in the foreign office, warned Pinkney that 
Napoleon's promise in the Cadore letter was no promise at all, 
but only a ruse to tempt England to relax her Orders before 
November i. Madison jumped at every offer, from whatever 
source it came, to secure the freedom of our commerce by 
peaceful coercion. With the same precipitate confidence with 
which he had renewed intercourse with England in 1809 
on Erskine's garbled representation, he prohibited intercourse 
with England in 1810 on Napoleon's flimsy promise. On No- 
vember 2 he issued a proclamation declaring that the French 
Decrees had been revoked and that nonintercourse with Great 
Britain should be revived unless her Orders were repealed 
before February 2, 181 1. Our commerce was increasing rap- 
idly under the Macon Bill. A tonnage of 127,000 was added to 
our merchant marine in the year 18 10. Our exports rose in that 
year from $52,000,000 to $67,000,000, and our customs receipts 
from $7,000,000 to $12,750,000. As more than half of our 
foreign trade was carried on with Great Britain and her de- 
pendencies, the chances seemed good that the British ministry 
would recede from its position. But Downing Street knew 
Napoleon better than Washington did. The ministry refused 
to fall into his trap. The second of February, 181 1, passed 

^This double dealing was discovered by Gallatin, our minister to France, in 
1821 and called by him "a glaring act of combined injustice, bad faith, and 
meanness." Twenty years after the overthrow of Napoleon we recovered some 
$5,000,000 damages, called the "French claims," for these depredations on 
our shipping. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 



249 



without any modification of the Orders, and one month later 
Congress sanctioned the revival of nonintercourse with Great 
Britain by a large majority. 

Public sentiment in America was setting strongly toward 
war. It was felt that we should have done with protests and 
expedients, with shifting policies that waited on Napoleon's 
whims or Wellesley's pride, and manfully assert our rights as 
a free people. The congressional election of 18 10, sweeping 
out nearly half the members of the House, returned a group of 
new men, mostly from the South and West, who represented the 
rising generation. Henry Clay of Kentucky was their leader, 
and with him were associated John C. Calhoun, Langdon 
Cheves, and William Lowndes of South Carolina, Felix Grundy 
of Tennessee, Peter Porter of New York, and Richard Johnson 
of Kentucky. They were aggressive, confident, and intensely 
patriotic. They were all under forty. They had no pa- 
tience with the tortuous diplomatic policy of European 
courts, no lingering memories of the evolution from colonies 
into states, no scruples lest the rights of the states should be 
infringed by too vigorous a policy in Congress. They were 
of a different generation from the Jeffersons, the Madisons, 
and the Macons. John Randolph heaped his sarcasm on ^Hhe 
boys" and dubbed them ^Var hawks,'' but their spirit bore 
down all opposition and made further hope of reconciliation 
with England vain. 

Before the "war hawks" took their seat in the new Congress, 
which Madison convened on November 4, 181 1, important 
events had occurred to widen the breach between England 
and the United States. At the end of February William 
Pinkney, tired of fruitless conversations with Wellesley, had 
asked for his audience of leave, and "for the first time in the 
history of our country an American minister quitted London in 
a hostile and threatening manner." In April Robert Smith 
had been replaced in the State Department by James Monroe, 
whose experience in Paris, Madrid, and London had disabused 
him of confidence in the favor of any of the chancelleries of 
Europe for the cause of American rights. On May 16 the 



2 50 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



United States frigate President, Commodore Rodgers command- 
ing, while patrolling our shores to protect merchantmen against 
the impressments which Great Britain had resumed after the 
revival of the Nonintercourse Act against her, fell in with the 
British sloop of war Little Belt and in a brisk battle forced her 
to strike her colors. Rodgers's victory was hailed with joy as a 
tardy but complete revenge for the Chesapeake humiliation in 
the same waters four years earlier. And when the new British 
minister, Foster, arrived in Washington, authorized at last to 
settle the Chesapeake affair by restoring the two surviving 
sailors to the deck from which they had been taken, he found 
the Americans already fully satisfied by Rodgers's victory and 
talking of the invasion of Canada rather than the punishment 
of Berkeley. 

Just after Congress had assembled, news came from our 
Western frontier calculated still further to exasperate our feel- 
ings against Great Britain. The Indians in the territory beyond 
Ohio were disturbed by the constant westward pressure of 
our pioneers. Some of the tribes united under the formidable 
chieftain Tecumseh to resist further encroachment on the land 
which the Great Spirit had given them for their hunting- 
grounds. Tecumseh and his twin brother, ^'the Prophet," or 
medicine man^ established their headquarters on the Wabash 
near Tippecanoe Creek, to bid defiance to Wilham Henry 
Harrison, the governor of the Indian Territory. On Novem- 
ber 7, 1811, while Tecumseh was absent in the South stirring 
up the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees to join in the con- 
federacy, the Prophet made an attack on Harrison's force. 
The Indians were driven off, and the next day the}^ abandoned 
their village, which Harrison entered and burned. Tecumseh 
went over to the British in Canada, who had long been seeking 
to sow discord between the Indians and their ^Svhite brothers" 
south of the lakes. Harrison confirmed the belief of our Western 
pioneers that England was putting arms into the hands of the 
Indians, by reporting the capture of quantities of English gun- 
powder and rifles on the battlefield of Tippecanoe, apparently 
purchased from the king's stores at IMalden. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 251 



President Madison was already yielding to the popular pres- 
sure for war. He recounted our grievances at length in his 
message of November 5, 181 1, asking Congress to ^'put the 
country into an attitude demanded by the crisis." Congress 
came to his support. It voted to increase the regular army by 
25,000 soldiers^ permitted the President to accept 50,000 new 
volunteers, ordered the refitting of the frigates Adams, Constel- 
lation, and Chesapeake, appropriated 8200,000 annually for 
three years for further naval repairs, authorized a loan of 
$1 1,000,000 in 6 per cent bonds, and sanctioned the levy of taxes 
on salt, whisky, slaves, and carriages in case war should come. 
^'The period has arrived," said Porter in his report from the 
Committee on Foreign Relations, ^Vhen it is the sacred duty of 
Congress to call for the patriotism and resources of the coun- 
try." On May 19, 181 2, the sloop Hornet arrived, bringing a 
dispatch from the British foreign office which Madison many 
years later called ^'the more immediate impulse to the war." 
It declared that Great Britain could make no change in her 
Orders in Council until Napoleon had absolutely and uncon- 
ditionally rescinded his Decrees, and spoke of America's accept- 
ance of Napoleon's treacherous proffer as ^'utterly subversive 
of the most important and indisputable maritime rights of 
the British Empire." 

Forced to choose, as he said, between war and degradation, 
Madison, on June i, 181 2, sent in to Congress the single vig- 
orous message of his administration. In it he reviewed the 
long list of outrages on our maritime rights as a neutral since 
the renewal of the European war in 1803: the illegal paper 
blockade"; the violation of the American flag on the great 
highway of nations by the seizure of persons sailing under it ; 
the hovering of British cruisers on our very coast, harassing our 
ships as they went and came, and even ^Vantonly shedding 
the blood of our citizens." ^'Such is the spectacle of injuries 
and indignities which have been heaped upon our country, and 
such the crisis which its unexampled forebearance and con- 
ciliatory efforts have not been able to avert. . . . Whether 
the United States shall continue passive under these accumulat- 



252 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



ing wrongs, or, opposing force to force in defence of their 
natural rights, shall commit a just cause into the hands of the 
Almighty Dispenser of events, ... is a solemn question which 
the Constitution wisely confides to the legislative department 
of the government. In recommending it to their early delib- 
erations I am happy in the assurance that the decision will 
be worthy the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous, 
a free, and a powerful nation." The hand was Madison's, but 
the voice was Henry Clay's. Congress by a vote of 79 to 49 
in the House and 19 to 13 in the Senate declared for war,^ 
and on June 18 Madison signed the fateful bill. flung 
forward the flag of the country," said the aged Madison in 
a conversation with George Bancroft a quarter of a century 
later, ^'sure that the people would press onward and defend it." 

The War of 1812 

The War of 181 2 was a blunder. It was unnecessary, im- 
politic, untimely, and rash. Not that our grievances against 
Great Britain had not been serious enough for several years 
past to justify war. The indictment of Madison's message 
of June I was not exaggerated. But those grievances were 
less acute in the summer of 181 2 than at any other moment 
since the attack on the Chesapeake five years before. A wise 
and statesmanlike view at Washington must have seen in the 
situation both in England and on the continent of Europe, in 
the twelve months past, fair promise that the grievances would 
cease at no very distant date. We had been patient in the 
years of great trial ; we lost our patience in the days of relief. 
We allowed Napoleon Bonaparte, by a promise whose hollow- 
ness was evident to every statesman of judgment on both sides 
of the ocean the day after it was given, to force us into a war 
with England at the moment when he was leading his grand 

iThis vote shows a good deal of opposition as compared with the votes 
committing us to our other foreign v^^ars. On the Mexican War the vote was 
174 to 14 in the House and 40 to 2 in the Senate ; we entered the World War 
by a vote of 373 to 50 in the House and 86 to 6 in the Senate. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 253 



army into Russia to destroy the last state on the Continent 
that dared to brave his despotic will. The Decrees of Napoleon 
and the British Orders in Council were admittedly the basic 
causes for the war/ If our State Department had heeded and 
understood the admirable dispatches from our minister John 
Quincy Adams at St. Petersburg, it would have read, in the 
refusal of the Czar to shut the Baltic Sea to American com- 
merce at the behest of Napoleon, the beginning of the downfall 
of the Continental System. If our able minister William Pinkney 
had been ordered to remain at London instead of leaving in a 
huff in the spring of 181 1, he would have noted beneath all the 
stiff pride of Wellesley and Spencer Perceval the growing de- 
mand in Parliament for concessions, which actually resulted in 
the announcement of the total repeal of the Orders in Coun- 
cil two days before our Congress declared war. If General 
Armstrong had remained at Paris, he would not have allowed 
Napoleon's foreign minister, Maret, to palm off on him a docu- 
ment antedated by a year, which repeated the lie of the revoca- 
tion of the Berlin and Milan Decrees as applied to America. 
But we abandoned diplomacy at the very moment when we 
needed it most. In the summer of 181 1, when the war spirit 
was rising in the country, and the Congress which the war 
hawks were to dominate was already called in early session, 
we had no minister at the court of England or France. A 
few months more of patient diplomacy would have averted 
the war. 

If, however, national honor demanded that we should 
fight in 181 2, it is by no means clear that England was the 
nation with which we should have fought. So far as it lay within 
his power. Napoleon was as contemptuous of American rights 
as was Great Britain. True, his cruisers did not hover on 
mr coasts — for he had no cruisers to hover ; he did not impress 
American sailors — for he had no fleet to man with them. But 

^To be sure, the impressment issue was constant, but as Henry Adams points 
out, it had never been made a casus belli. Great Britain's attitude was generally 
one of willingness to adjust it. It became a waning issue after England's com- 
plete defeat of Napoleon on the sea (1805). 



254 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



he treacherously confiscated millions of dollars' worth of Amer- 
ican shipping in the ports of France, Denmark, Holland, Spain, 
and Naples and appropriated the receipts to the imperial treas- 
ury. A table contributed to Congress by Madison in July, 1812, 
showed that the French had seized 558 American vessels and 
the British 389 during the five preceding years. John Rus- 
sell, our charge d'affaires at Paris, wrote repeatedly in 181 1 to 
warn Madison that ^^the great object of Napoleon's policy" 
was to entangle us in a war with England," and that the French 
emperor refused to give any clear evidence of the repeal of the 
Decrees, ^^lest it should induce the extinction of the British Or- 
ders and thereby appease our irritation" against Great Britain. 
Even Madison himself naively agreed in a letter to Jefferson 
(March, 181 1) that it was difficult to understand the meaning 
of Bonaparte towards us," and attempted to excuse him for his 
obvious folly" on the score of his ^'ignorance of commerce." 
Furthermore, the British ministers were not using threats, 
cajolery, and ruse to drive us into a war with France. If 
Canning was brutal and Wellesley haughty, they were at least 
frank. Neither of them used sickening words of flattery to us 
and lied in his throat. Finally, it was Napoleon and not Eng- 
land that was the enemy of the human race. Our declaration 
of war on the power that most consistently and effectively stood 
between Napoleon and an enslaved Europe seemed to many 
in our country little less than striking an alliance with the 
Corsican plunderer. 

Yet it is not hard to see why England was the worse enemy 
in the popular mind. Aside from the general considerations 
that the whole leaning of the party which had been in power 
since the beginning of the century was toward France and 
that England was our ^'traditional enemy," the specific acts 
of British provocation were much more exasperating than any- 
thing Napoleon could do to us. American seamen had actually 
been killed by British cannon balls on the high seas. American 
sailors had actually been pressed into the crews of British men- 
of-war to endure the brutal treatment, the starvation rations. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 255 



and the noisome quarters of their floating prisons.^ In the 
South and West, where the war fever was intense, both eco- 
nomic and poHtical interests were anti-British. The South, not 
yet bound to England by the ties of cotton, still preserved the 
Jeffersonian prejudice in favor of agriculture against shipping. 
The West, ardent for expansion, found England and not France 
athwart the path. It was British agents in Canada who, from 
St. Clair's defeat in 1791 to Harrison's victory in 181 1, had 
encouraged the Indians to resist our advance into the North- 
west, which Great Britain had ceded to us in the treaty of 1783. 
It was the British minister at Washington who protested 
against Madison's occupation of West Florida.^ And since the 
union of England and Spain against Napoleon in 1808, Great 
Britain supplanted France as the strong power which would 
prevent our flag from flying over the fortresses of the Gulf 
shore. Napoleon's diplomatic policy might be treacherous, 
and his confiscations (chiefly at the expense of New England 
merchants) exasperating. But Napoleon was remote, and Eng- 
land was provokingly near. 

Yet England did not want war with us any more than we 
wanted war with her. She was laboring under great economic 
and political distress. The burden of the Napoleonic wars had 
driven her debt up to nearly 84,000,000,000. Her exports had 
declined 33 per cent in the year 181 1. In the autumn of the 
same year, after a winter of bitter cold and a summer of rain 
and fog, the price of wheat rose to about $4 a bushel. Riots 
broke out in several counties. George III had become hope- 

iJn January, 181 2, Madison sent to Congress a most detailed report of Mon- 
roe's on cases of impressment which had come under notice. They amount to 
no less than 6057, a number which an investigating committee of the Massachu- 
setts legislature found "three or four times too large." 

2 Madison, in full accord with the Jeffersonian theory that we had purchased 
West Florida in the Louisiana treaty of 1803, issued a proclamation, Octo- 
ber 27, 1810, joining that region to the territory of Orleans, and even secured 
from Congress, in 1811, authorization to occupy East Florida, to which we 
had never pretended to have a claim. The part of West Florida west of the 
Pearl River was incorporated into the new state of Louisiana in 1812. 



2 56 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



lessly insane, and in the interval which preceded the establish- 
ment of the regency Spencer Perceval, the ultra-Tory minister, 
carried on the government with a high hand. From the as- 
sembling of Parliament, in January, 1812, it was evident that 
the Perceval government was doomed. The marquis of Lands- 
downe in the Lords and Henry Brougham in the Commons 
attacked the Orders in Council and pleaded for the concessions 
necessary for the reopening of the trade with the United States, 
which was worth $60,000,000 a year to England. Even Canning 
was won to the policy of relaxation and voted with the 144 
members who supported Brougham. In April Castlereaglh 
offered to stop issuing licenses and put an end to paper block- 
ades if the United States would restore commercial intercourse. 
A few days later the regent offered to declare the Orders in 
Council revoked as soon as Napoleon should give convincing 
evidence of the repeal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees. All 
this pointed in one direction, as a man of Pinkney's sagacity 
must have seen if he had been at his post at the court of St. 
James. Then came Perceval's assassination by a lunatic in the 
lobby of Parliament, on May 1 1 ; and in the confusion of the 
hour, ere the literal downfall of the chief was known in America, 
President Madison sent his war message to Congress. 

The United States was woefully unprepared for war, though 
in a flourishing condition for times of peace. Our wealth and 
population were growing rapidly. The census of 18 10 showed 
a population of 7,240,000, an increase of 35 per cent over the 
number at the time of Jefferson's first inauguration. In spite of 
the reestablishment of nonintercourse with Great Britain, our 
foreign commerce for the year 181 1 was still well over lioo,- 
000,000, 93 per cent of which was carried on in American ships. 
Secretary Gallatin's report to Congress in November presented 
the pleasing prospect of a surplus of $5,000,000 for the next 
fiscal year. We were an agricultural country, our exports con- 
sisting chiefly of cotton, tobacco, rice, flour, potatoes, and 
grain. But Jefferson's commercial policy had already caused 
the diversion of considerable capital from shipping to manufac- 
tures. By 1 81 2 about a hundred cotton mills in the country 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 257 



were using 3,600,000 pounds of raw cotton, and the manufac- 
tures of wool, flax, leather, wood, and iron were mounting to a 
total of some $50,000,000. The beginning of the Cumberland 
Road in 1807 (to run from Cumberland, Maryland, through 
Pennsylvania and Ohio to the West), the elaborate plans of 
Jefferson and Gallatin for the devotion of national income to 
schemes of internal improvement, the opening of the North- 
west through Harrison's victory over the Indians at Tippecanoe, 
and the placing of the steamboat on the Western waters all gave 
promise of an era of expansion and prosperity. 

But none of this wealth and opportunity was mobilized for 
war. The regular army consisted of ten half-filled regiments 
of untrained and ill-equipped men, dispersed in petty garrison 
squads along our extended frontier and in our chief coast forts. 
From the Wabash and Maumee Rivers westward the country 
was unprotected, except for garrisons of about 100 men 
each in Forts Dearborn (Chicago) at the foot and Mackinaw 
at the head of Lake Michigan, with some 125 soldiers at the 
important post of Detroit. Congress had appropriated barely 
$3,000,000 for the army in 181 1. The old officers were de- 
scribed by Winfield Scott as ^'generally sunk in either sloth, 
ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking . . . Swaggerers, 
dependents, decayed gentlemen . . . utterly unfit for any mili- 
tary purpose whatever." The new appointments of 18 12 were 
little better. Henry Dearborn, Jefferson's old Secretary of War 
and later customs officer at Boston, was named senior major 
general. He was without counsel in the camp or experience 
in the field. Thomas Pinckney, the junior major general, had 
made an enviable record in diplomacy at the courts of Madrid 
and London, but his military education had ceased thirty 
years before, with the defense of the Carolinas against Corn- 
wallis and Tarleton. Of the half dozen brigadier generals ap- 
pointed, including the notorious James Wilkinson, not a single 
one had served in the regular army, and only William Hull, 
governor of the Michigan Territory, had actually led a regiment 
in battle. The generals were all between fifty-five and sixty- 
seven years of age. The navy which we had to oppose to Great 



2 58 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

Britain's 800 ships consisted of 16 frigates, brigs, and sloops 
of war, running from 150 to 1500 tons, and only 3 carrying 
more than 40 guns. The 165 gunboats, so dear to Jefferson's 
heart, were of some little use in defending the coast in still 
waters, but in a heavy sea they were in danger of careening 
under the weight of their single gun! ^'A few fir-built frig- 
ates manned by bastards and outlaws" was a London journal's 
contemptuous summary of our navy. Yet, insignificant as our 
naval force was in comparison with Great Britain's, it was com- 
manded by young, enterprising, and intrepid officers like Bain- 
bridge, Isaac Hull^ Decatur, Lawrence, and Rodgers, most of 
whom had seen service in the Mediterranean wars. 

Military unpreparedness, however, was only one of the hand- 
icaps under which we entered the war with England. Lack 
of roads, canals, bridges^ causeways, and dredges made com- 
munication between the Atlantic seaboard and the trans- 
Allegheny region costly and difficult. Munitions and supplies 
had to be laboriously transported across rivers, swamps, and 
wilderness. Officers were distressed to keep up a semblance 
of morale in their meager armies, half mutinous from hunger 
and cold. The factious Congress of 181 1, chiefly to vent its 
spite on Gallatin, had refused to recharter the National Bank 
and had thus deprived the government of its fiscal agent at 
just the moment when it needed it most. Forced to depend on 
the state banks^ with their unregulated issues of paper and the 
varying credit of their notes in the different sections of the 
country, Gallatin found great difficulty in placing the loan of 
$11,000,000 which Congress had been induced to authorize in 
]\Iarch, 1812. When the harassed secretary asked for the 
levy of internal taxes^ the House rebuked him for proposing 
^^unrepublican measures." 

Most serious of all the handicaps of the administration was 
the lack of that national spirit of cooperation which would 
easily have produced men and money in abundance to win the 
war. Not only were the vast majority of our people apathetic, 
but whole sections, notably New England, were bitterly opposed 
to the war. When the declaration was voted, thirty-four con- 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 259 



gressmen signed a vigorous protest which was circulated all 
over the country. The Federalists asserted that the war was 
precipitated by the ^'Virginia cabal" and the madmen of 
Kentucky and Tennessee," for the sake of conquering Canada 
and ruining the flourishing commerce of the United States. It 
was nothing less than a base alliance with the tyrant Napoleon 
for shattering the British Empire. Two of their leaders called 
on the British minister Foster to suggest a plan for commercial 
cooperation and said openly that their sole hope from the war 
was that it would ^^turn out the administration" and leave 
the Federalists to ^^make a solid peace with Great Britain." The 
New Englanders hung their flags at half-mast and tolled the 
bells in their churches when war was declared. The governors 
of Massachusetts; Rhode Island, and Connecticut refused to 
heed the President's call for militia, on the ground that the 
conditions, as prescribed by the Constitution, under which the 
militia could be called out did not exist.^ With more than half 
the specie of the country in her bank vaults. New England 
subscribed for less than $1,000,000 of the $11,000,000 
loan of 1812, and during the entire war contributed less than 
$3,000,000 of the $41,000,000 paid into the Treasury. In 
addition to this negative policy of obstruction, the Northern 
and Eastern states were guilty of positively treasonable inter- 
course with the enemy across the border. ^* Two-thirds of the 
army in Canada," wrote the British commissioner Sir George 
Provost to his superior in London, in August, 18 14, ^'are at 
this moment eating beef provided by the American contractors, 
drawn principally from the states of Vermont and New York ; 
. . . large droves are daily crossing the lines, coming into 
Lower Canada." 

1 Under the Constitution (Art. I, sect. 8, par. 15) Congress has power "to 
provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress 
insurrections, and repel invasions." As if the declaration of war, passed by 
both Houses of Congress and signed by the President, were not a *'law of the 
Union"! The governors, supported by their legislatures, assumed to judge 
for themselves when the state of the country (or at least their part of it) 
needed defending. A decision of the Supreme Court in 1827 settled the question 
by confirming this right of judgment to the President. 



26o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



In spite of an enrolled militia of nearly 700,000 men in the 
states, less than 10 per cent of the 50,000 whom Congress 
authorized the President to call out responded at the beginning 
of the war. In spite of increased pay and bounties in land and 
money, less than one third of the soldiers provided for by the 
regular-army bill were recruited in the summer of 1812. We 
had over 1,000,000 male white citizens of military age, yet the 
War Department could never put an army of more than 10,000 
or 12,000 men in the field at one time. From the close of 
1 8 13 to the end of the war the effective strength of our forces 
varied between 30,000 and 35,000 men. Scanty as these forces 
were, they were generally superior to the number of Canadians 
and Indians who could be marshaled to oppose them on the 
Lakes and the St. Lawrence. If our troops had had proper 
commissariat and conveyance, above all if they had had wise 
and brave leaders, they would easily have carried out the plan 
of campaign, which was to drive the British from Upper Canada, 
blockade the St. Lawrence, and capture Montreal. The Repub- 
lican politicians, young and old^ had no doubt of the speedy 
triumph of our arms on land, though they conceded that the 
British navy would sweep our ships from the ocean. Clay 
boasted that the riflemen of Kentucky alone would conquer 
Canada, and Thomas Jefferson declared that the advance to 
Montreal was ^'only a question of marching." 

The attack on Canada was to be delivered at four points: 
from Detroit at the western end of Lake Erie, along the Niagara 
River at the eastern end, at Kingston (where Lake Ontario 
narrows into the St. Lawrence), and from Lake Champlain down 
to Montreal. The movement of the American armies was to be 
from west to east, across Upper Canada and down the river. The 
plan failed at every point. General Hull was making a laborious 
march with some 2000 men through the forests and swamps of 
western Ohio to reach the important fort of Detroit, when he 
learned that war had been declared. The British in Canada had 
received the news before him and had captured a schooner on 
Lake Erie in which Hull had risked sending ahead his baggage 
and hospital stores, together with a trunk containing papers 




The War of 1812 on the Canadian Border 



262 THE UNITED STATES OF A^IERICA 



relating to his plan of campaign and the rolls of his troops. 
Soon after his arrival at Detroit^ Hull got orders from Wash- 
ington to invade Canada (July 9), and three days later he 
crossed the Detroit River, with a pompous and threatening 
proclamation, to lay siege to the British post of JMalden. But 
the march through the Ohio wilderness seems to have exhausted 
Hull's energy. He pottered around Maiden, while his own 
soldiers grew^ disgusted and his adversary, General Isaac Brock, 
collected reenforcements on the northern shore of Lake Erie. As 
the British controlled the lake, Hull's only hope lay in a rapid and 
complete victory over the garrison at Llalden before help could 
arrive. Without support from the American armies to the east- 
w^ard, and separated by two hundred miles from a base of sup- 
plies to the southward, he was in a trap. When he heard that the 
American garrison at IMackinaw had surrendered and that Brit- 
ish reenforcements were on the way to Maiden from the east, he 
hastily abandoned the siege and recrossed the river to Detroit. 
Even when back in the fort with plenty of ammunition and over 
1000 effective defenders, Hull failed to regain his courage. He 
sank into a mood of apathy and dejection, brooding over the 
imaginary picture of Indian hordes descending on Detroit with 
torch and tomahawk. When Brock, with only 700 men, crossed 
over to the American side of the Detroit River (August 16) and 
prepared to assault the fort, he was astonished to see a mes- 
senger approaching his lines with a white flag. Hull surren- 
dered the fort and his entire army without striking a blow. 
The fall of Detroit meant the loss of the entire Northwest.^ 
The American military frontier receded at once from the ]Missis- 
sippi to the Wabash, and the American army marched through 
Upper Canada as prisoners of war and not as conquering heroes. 
General Hull was tried by court-martial, found guilty of cow- 
ardice, and condemned to be shot. But President iMadison 
pardoned him on account of his services in the Revolution — 
and his gray hairs. 

^The day before Hull's surrender, and by bis order. Fort Dearborn at the 
foot of Lake Michigan was evacuated. The garrison was massacred by the 
Indians in the process. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 



The success of the plan for the invasion of Canada depended 
on the cooperation of the armies at both ends of Lake Erie 
and on the St. Lawrence. But there was no agreement between 
the administration at Washington and the senior major general 
Dearborn, who should have been operating at Niagara to sup- 
port Hull by prevei:iting the British from transporting reen- 
forcements up Lake Erie to Maiden, was at Boston on the day 
of Hull's surrender, debating with himself whether he had better 
stay on the Atlantic seaboard or go to the Lakes. He had 
ordered a suspension of hostilities in order that a plan of armi- 
stice, suggested by the British when the news of the repeal of 
the Orders in Council reached America, might be discussed. 
When operations were renewed on the Niagara River, Hull's 
fate was already sealed, and Brock's forces were released for 
service at the eastern end of Lake Erie. There General Stephen 
Van Rensselaer of the New York militia and General Alexander 
Smythe of the regular army, instead of joining cordially for an 
effective attack, quarreled as to the time, the place, and the 
method of gaining the Canadian shore. Van Rensselaer led a 
little body of regulars across the river (October 13) and seized 
Queenstown Heights, but the New York militia refused to leave 
the state and complacently watched the rout of the regulars 
by a superior Canadian force. Smythe then took his turn, very 
fierce in proclamation and very tame in action. Aside from a 
morning raid off Black Rock, in which he captured a few 
British guns and partially destroyed a bridge, all his bluster 
resulted in nothing. Whenever he considered an embarkment, 
the inadequacy of his force appalled him. Early in December 
he decided to go into winter quarters. Peter B. Porter publicly 
accused Smythe of cowardice, and the men fought a duel — after 
their seconds had taken the balls out of the pistols. It was 
in accordance with the general opera bouffe on the Niagara. 
Out of 4000 American troops gathered there in the autumn of 
1812, not 1000 could be persuaded to cross the river. 

Dearborn himself, with a force as large as Hull's and 
Smythe's combined, was in command on Lake Champlain, in- 
tending to march down on Montreal as Smythe attacked at 



2 64 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

Niagara. On November 19 he marched to the Canadian line, 
which his militia refused to cross, and four days later he 
marched back to Plattsburg. Hull, Van Rensselaer, and Smythe 
had at least set some soldiers on Canadian soil, but the senior 
major general could only march his army twenty miles and 
back, like the King of France in the jingle. ^'He was laughed 
at," wrote George Hay, ^'by both Federalists and Republicans, 
and should have gone the way to retirement along with Hull 
and Smythe, to make room for better men." But it took more 
than a calamity to nerve Madison to make a dismissal. 

A pleasing contrast to this dismal record of our armies on the 
Canadian frontier was furnished by the exploits of our little 
navy in the first six months of the war. Three days after his 
uncle had disgracefully surrendered Detroit (August 19) Cap- 
tain Isaac Hull, in the 44-gun frigate Constitution^ met the 
British brig Guerriere (38 guns) in the north Atlantic, and in 
a spirited battle of half an hour reduced her to a floating hulk 
of wreckage. When the news of Hull's victory reached Boston 
it sent a wave of enthusiasm through the country. It mattered 
little that the American frigate was superior in every way to 
her adversary; the important thing was that a British warship, 
whose captain had been active in impressing sailors from our 
merchantmen and had spread on the log of his plundered vic- 
tims a taunting challenge to any American frigate, had struck 
its colors. The days of John Paul Jones had returned. Our 
captains hastened to sea to emulate the deed of Hull. In 
October the i8-gun sloop Wasp made prize of the equally 
matched Frolic, convoying a British West Indian fleet, 600 
miles east of Norfolk. A few days later the United States, 
commanded by Decatur, defeated the Macedonian off the 
Azores and brought her into New London — -the only British 
warship ever brought into an American port as a prize. In 
December Captain Bainbridge, in the Constitution, destroyed 
the Java off the coast of Brazil, the British and American 
frigates being equally matched in size, guns, and crew. In six 
months the Americans had forced three British frigates and 
two sloops of war to strike their colors, while they themselves 



266 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



had lost nothing larger than the i8-gun Wasp.^ Our privateers 
had taken over 300 British merchantmen in seven months. Of 
course, the loss of four or five warships was of small conse- 
quence to the great British navy; but the American victories 
had the moral effect of stimulating our flagging zeal and the 
practical effect of keeping the British cruisers away from our 
ports just when the large fleet of merchantmen which had sailed 
from England on the repeal of the Orders in Council, and before 
the news of the declaration of war had reached Europe, were 
bringing millions of dollars' worth of imports to strengthen our 
impoverished treasury. 

The news of these victories did not arrive in time to affect the 
election of 181 2, in which Madison defeated his rival, De Witt 
Clinton, by the not very ample margin of 128 votes to 89. 
The Federalists made large gains in New England and New 
York, electing double the number of representatives that they 
had sent to the famous Twelfth Congress. The new Congress, 
called in extra session in May, 18 13, was obliged by the press- 
ing needs of the war to put behind it the whole Jeffersonian 
policy of the abolition of internal taxes and to levy duties on car- 
riages, auction sales, sugar, salt, wines, and liquors, besides 
apportioning a direct tax of $3,000,000 among the states and 
imposing a stamp tax on notes and bills of exchange. The 
expenses of the government had mounted to $16,000,000 for 
the six months preceding the call of Congress, and it was esti- 
mated that $2 7,000,000 more would be needed to see the year 
1 8 13 through. To supplement the revenue from tariff and 
internal taxes. Congress authorized a loan of $7,500,000. All 
these financial measures had been carefully prepared by Gal- 
latin before he sailed for Europe on a mission which we shall 
notice presently, and were passed by respectable majorities. 
The government was obliged to struggle on, as best it could, 
with loans and taxes and the emission of Treasury notes, while 
our import trade sank, under the increasing severity of the 

few hours after the Wasp's victory over the Frolic the 74-gun British ship 
Poktiers had hove in sight and taken both the victor and her prize into 
Bermuda. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 



267 



British blockade, from $77,000,000 in 181 2 to $22,000,000 in 
1813 and $13,000,000 in 1814. 

The mihtary campaigns of the spring and summer of 1813 
showed no more cause for congratulation than those of the 
year before. There was the same tale of dilatoriness, discord, 
and disaster. A detachment of Kentuckians, foolishly pushing 
ahead of General Harrison's army, were defeated at French- 
town, a few miles south of Detroit, January 22, 1813, and their 
wounded, left behind by the British general Procter without 
a guard, were horribly massacred in the night by a band of 
drunken Indians. James Wilkinson and Wade Hampton re- 
placed Van Rensselaer and Smythe at the Niagara front, while 
General Dearborn went into retirement. But Wilkinson and 
Hampton, who regarded each other with a mixture of jealousy 
and contempt, failed as signally as Dearborn to make any ad- 
vance on Montreal, and went into winter quarters with nothing 
to show but wasted time and mutual recriminations for their 
so-called campaigns. The general gloom was deepened by a 
calamity which checked the victorious career of our frigates. 
On June i Captain Lawrence, in the ill-fated Chesapeake, met 
the British frigate Shannon (Captain Brook) outside Boston 
Harbor. In an engagement of fifteen minutes the Chesapeake 
suffered the fate of the Giierriere, and Lawrence was carried be- 
low decks mortally wounded and vainly pleading with his dying 
breath, Don't give up the ship!'^ 

New British cruisers arrived off our coast, drawing a strin- 
gent blockade from New London southward. The frigates 
United States, Constellation, Macedonian, and Adams were 
penned up in our ports, the Constitution was undergoing repairs, 
the President and the Essex were at sea, the Congress was con- 
demned, and all our brigs except the Enterprise were captured. 
By the autumn of 1813 we had not a single ship patrolling our 
coast, and the British landed where they would. Exports from 
New York fell from over $12,000,000 in 181 1 to $200,000 
in 1814, and those of Virginia from $4,800,000 to $17,500. 
From Long Island Sound to the Savannah River foreign trade 
virtually ceased. 



268 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The one redeeming exploit of American arms in the year 
1813 was the recovery of the Northwest. Hull's surrender of 
Detroit had shamed and frightened the Western states into an 
unwonted display of energy, as it let loose the Indian menace 
and brought the scalping parties to within thirty miles of 
Louisville. The Kentuckians raised over 10,000 volunteers. 
The governor of the state appointed the hero of Tippecanoe 
the major general of its militia. Only twelve days after the fall 
of Detroit, Harrison started northward from Cincinnati, with 
the largest army ever mustered in the United States west of the 
Alleghenies, to recapture the fort. The Navy Department, now 
at last fully awake to the importance of controlling Lake Erie, 
set Commodore Chauncey at work to construct a fleet at 
Presqu'ile (Erie). Here he was joined at the end of March, 
1 8 13, by Captain Oliver H. Perry of Newport, a young veteran 
of the French war of 1798 and the Tripolitan war of 1803. By 
midsummer Perry had built and launched five ships at Pres- 
qu'ile, sending as far as Buffalo and Pittsburgh for material and 
equipment, and had dexterously conveyed to the same port five 
other vessels, which had been penned up in the Niagara River 
by the British guns at Fort Erie. On August 5 Perry got his 
squadron across the bar in front of the harbor of Presqu'ile 
and sailed up the lake to a point off the mouth of the Sandusky 
River, on which Harrison was encamped. His shortage in men 
was remedied by the dispatch of 100 Kentuckians from 
Harrison's army to serve on the fleet. He had two brigs of 20 
tons each, the flagship Lawrence, and the Niagara, while his 
smaller craft carried from i to 4 guns each. His opponent. 
Captain Barclay, who had served with Nelson at Trafalgar, had 
six vessels, carrying altogether 63 guns to Perry's 57. But the 
American guns were much heavier, throwing a broadside of 
900 lb. of metal to 500 for the British. The two fleets met 
in Put-in-Bay, September 10, 181 3, and after a furious fight 
of three hours every one of the British ships had struck her 
colors. The battle was decided by as brave a deed as is written 
in the annals of our navy. When Perry's flagship, the Lawrence, 
bearing the brunt of the British attack, was reduced to a total 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 269 



wreck, Perry went over her side into a small boat and, bearing 
the blue flag inscribed with the immortal words Don't give up 
the ship," was rowed, under the fire of the British guns, to the 
Niagara, which had been fighting at long range on the edge of 
the battle. Perry brought the Niagara into the midst of the 
fight and, passing between the British ships, swept them with 
both broadsides at once until they struck. Before the smoke 
of battle had cleared away. Perry sent the good news to 
Harrison in the famous dispatch, ^'We have met the enemy 
and they are ours: two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and 
one sloop." 

Perry's victory compelled the British general Procter to 
abandon Detroit and Maiden and fall back toward the eastern 
end of the lake, to the great disgust of Tecumseh and his 
Indians. Harrison's troops, conveyed across the lake to the 
Canadian side, entered Maiden only three days after Procter 
had abandoned it. They pursued the British eastward along the 
road to Lake Ontario, overtaking them at Moravian Town on 
the Thames. There Richard M. Johnson's mounted Ken- 
tuckians drove through the British ranks along the river road, 
while the rest cleared the Indians out of the swamp and forest 
lands on the flank. Procter barely escaped capture after a 
precipitous flight, and the great Tecumseh was among the slain. 
The battle of the Thames, with Perry's victory on Lake Erie, 
restored the province lost by Hull. Detroit was again in Amer- 
ican hands; the British army abandoned Upper Canada be- 
tween the Lakes; the Indian menace on our borders was 
removed; and the country west of the Niagara River was 
undisturbed for the remainder of the war. 

In the spring of 18 14 Hampton and Wilkinson followed Hull, 
Smythe, Van Rensselaer, and Dearborn into retirement, and 
the northern theater of war was cleared of all the incompetent, 
swaggering, wrangling generals to make room for a group of 
energetic and able commanders. George Izard, a highly trained 
engineer, and Jacob Brown, a Quaker but the best fighter of 
the war except Andrew Jackson, were appointed major gen- 
erals, with Winfield Scott and Peter B. Porter among the six 



2 70 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

new brigadiers. The effects of the change were soon visible. 
Brown's army of 5500 crossed the Niagara on July 3, and, on 
the fifth, Scott's brigade in a splendid action at Chippewa drove 
the superior British force from the field. Three weeks later 
Brown waged a furious battle from mid-afternoon till far into 
the night a few miles down the river, at Lundy's Lane, driving 
the British again and again from their guns. Darkness and the 
exhaustion of his troops finally forced Brown to retire from 
the field, leaving the British technically the victors. But the 
losses in Drummond's army of 3000 were heavier than those 
of Brown's 2000; and when, after a period of recuperation, 
Drummond marched up the river to assault Fort Erie, he met 
the same stubborn resistance from officers and soldiers, for 
whom at last the British troops began to have an awesome 
respect. Four times within six weeks the Americans with in- 
ferior numbers beat off his attacks. He was in full retreat 
toward Chippewa when the Americans finally blew up the works 
at Fort Erie and retired to their own side of the river (Novem- 
ber 5, 1 8 14). The actual results achieved by Brown's campaign 
were not great, but the moral effect on the country of a com- 
mander who could train and inspire American troops was 
immense — especially as it came at a time of deep discourage- 
ment, when our Treasury was nearly empty, our ports block- 
aded, our ships penned up, our shores ravaged, our Capitol 
burned, and our Union in imminent danger of letting its power 
revert by default to the states which had created it. 

Nor was Brown's heroic campaign the only redeeming fea- 
ture of the year 18 14. While the Americans were crossing the 
Niagara to Chippewa and Lundy's Lane, large reenforcements 
from Wellington's army in the Spanish peninsula were on their 
way to Canada.^ Sir George Prevost, with a larger and finer 
army tlian Burgoyne had commanded, crossed the Canadian 

^Napoleon had been driven back to the French side of the Rhine by his 
crushing defeat at Leipzig (October 16-19, 1813), and his armies expelled from 
Spain by Wellington's victory at Vitoria (June 21, 1813). Over 10,000 trained 
British troops, released from service against the Corsican, were dispatched to 
America to finish up the war. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 271 



frontier early in September and set out toward Lake Champlain 
to repeat with better success Burgoyne's march of 1777. So 
confident was Prevost that he never broke his columns to de- 
ploy. The few American skirmishers who annoyed his march 
he ignored. Arrived before the strong redoubts which Izard 
had built just south of Plattsburg, he waited for the British 
fleet on Lake Champlain to enter Plattsburg Bay and cooperate 
in the assault. The British fleet was no less confident than the 
army. Besides the Confiance, of 37 guns and a crew of 300 
men, the British had three brigs and twelve gunboats. The 
American fleet, under Lieutenant Macdonough, a young man 
of thirty but a veteran of the Tripolitan wars, was nearly equal 
in the number of ships, but inferior in armament. To Mac- 
donough's 45 long-range guns, throwing a weight of 759 lb., 
the British fleet could oppose 60 guns, with a broadside of 
1 128 lb. Macdonough placed his ships across the entrance to 
the bay in such a way as to force the British to fight at close 
range. When his flagship, the Saratoga, had been apparently 
silenced by her powerful rival, the Confiance, Macdonough 
swung her completely around by a clever device of springs 
in her cables and brought her unused batteries to bear. The 
Confiance struck her colors, and the three smaller ships were 
soon obliged to follow suit. Macdonough's victory was com- 
plete. The next day (September 12) Prevost, unable to pro- 
ceed, with the Americans in command of the lake, led his 10,000 
back to Canada. 

Macdonough's victory on Lake Champlain was the most 
timely stroke of good fortune in the war. When the incredible 
news of it reached England in October, it dampened the ardor 
with which the press had clamored all summer for the annihila- 
tion of the ^'contemptible army" across the sea. When the news 
reached Ghent, where the British and American commissioners 
had been trying to negotiate a peace since early August, it 
heartened our envoys to stand by their demand for a treaty 
which should not sacrifice a foot of American territory. 

At home too the victory came as a solace in the midst of 
humiliations; for the public buildings at Washington were in 



2 72 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



ashes, and the British had ^^annexed" the coast of Maine from 
Passamaquoddy Bay to the Penobscot, with the acquiescence 
of the inhabitants. In June, 1814, INIajor General Ross had 
landed, with 4000 troops from Welhngton's peninsular army, to 
cooperate with Admiral Cochrane, a coarse, vindictive officer, 
whose landing parties for a year had been burning towns and 
pillaging farms along our blockaded coast. As a culminating 
act of their marauding expeditions, the British landed on the 
west bank of the Patuxent River and marched unhindered to 
Bladensburg, seven miles from Washington. The capital was 
absolutely undefended. General Winder, the officer in com- 
mand, was without council, courage, or resource. About 7000 
green militia were hastily gathered to oppose the British 
advance, but they broke and ran at the first attack of Ross's 
troops at Bladensburg (August 24), only a few hundred marines 
under Commodore Barney redeeming the honor of the Amer- 
ican uniform by a brave but futile resistance. The disgraceful 
affair was dubbed "the Bladensburg races." That evening the 
British entered the city, after Madison had fled for refuge to 
the Virginia woods, and set fire to the public buildings. Only 
heavy thunderstorms which broke that night and the next day 
saved the city from total destruction.^ From Washington the 
British sailed up Chesapeake Bay to repeat their depredations 
on the important commercial town of Baltimore. But their 
troops were repulsed before the redoubts of the town in a battle 
in which General Ross lost his Hfe, and their fleet, kept out of 
range by sunken hulks, after vainly trying in an all-night bom- 
bardment to lower the Star-Spangled Banner, w^hich was float- 
ing over Fort ]\IcHenry, headed down the bay for the capes 
(September 14, 1814). This was two days after General 

^This exhibition of vandalism in Washington was in retahation for the burn- 
ing, b}^ an American raiding party, of the government buildings at York, Ontario. 
But the latter act was perpetrated by an irresponsible mob, while the burning 
of Washington was ordered by a vice admiral in the British navy. The prince 
regent complimented Ross on this "enterprise so creditable to his Majesty's 
arms and so well calculated to humble the presumption of the American govern- 
ment . . . which has involved that country in an unnecessary and unjust war 
against his Ma'ty." 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES ^73 



Prevost had begun his retreat to Canada and three days before 
General Drummond failed in his assault on Brown's garrison 
at Fort Erie. 

The same September of 18 14 saw an important campaign in 
the Southwest. Florida belonged to England's ally, Spain. Its 
conquest was the object of the militia of Tennessee and Georgia, 
just as the conquest of Canada was the aim of the Northern 
armies. Soon after the war broke out, Andrew Jackson, a major 
general of the Tennessee militia, set out with 2000 men against 
^Hhe lower country." The government at Washington, how- 
ever, was not yet ready to precipitate war with Spain. To his 
great disgust Jackson was recalled, and the next year our troops 
were withdrawn from Amelia Island, a Spanish possession off 
the coast of Florida, which General Matthews had seized in 
March, 181 2. The Tennesseeans and Georgians, however, only 
awaited the opportunity to renew the attack on Florida, and that 
opportunity was furnished by the behavior of the Creek Indians 
in our Mississippi territory, who had been stirred up by English 
and Spanish agents from Florida, and still more by a visit from 
the great Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh. These ^'Red Sticks," 
as the hostile Creeks were called, took up the hatchet in the 
summer of 18 13 and massacred 250 whites in Fort Mimms on 
the lower Alabama. After a hard campaign of a year, in which 
he had to contend with hunger and incipient mutiny in his own 
ranks, as well as with the treacherous Indians, Jackson com- 
pletely broke the power of the hostile Creeks and compelled 
them to sign the treaty of Fort Jackson (August 9, 18 14), by 
which they relinquished to the United States two thirds of their 
lands in Alabama. The Mississippi territory thus cleared of the 
Indian danger, Jackson (who was promoted to a major general- 
ship in the regular army and given command of the military 
district of the Southwest) pushed on to drive the Spanish power 
from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. He occupied Mobile 
(August 15), and after repelling the attack of a British squad 
on Fort Bowyer at the mouth of Mobile Bay, he marched across 
the Perdido into East Florida and raised the American flag over 
the fort at Pensacola (November 7). 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



But Jackson was doomed to wait another three years before 
completing his conquest of East Florida. Already while he was 
at Mobile, Monroe, who had succeeded Armstrong in the War 
Department after the raid on Washington, sent him word that 
a formidable British expedition was preparing for an attack 
at the mouth of the Mississippi. It was composed of Ross's 
troops, summoned from Chesapeake Bay, fresh regiments from 
the Peninsular Army, and West Indians and negroes, amount- 
ing in all to some 10,000 men. The expedition was to rendez- 
vous at Jamaica on November 20, under the command of 
Wellington's brother-in-law, Sir Edward Pakenham. Generous 
provisions were made for Jackson in men and money, and he 
was urged by repeated messages from Monroe that New Orleans 
was the danger point. But Jackson's heart was set on the con- 
quest of Florida. He tarried at Mobile until the eve of the 
departure of the British expedition from Jamaica, and, turning 
at last westward, reached New Orleans only twelve days before 
Pakenham's advance troops entered Lake Borgne, captured the 
American gunboats, and made possible a landing on the shores 
of the lake only fifteen miles from the city. Not a breastwork 
had been erected for the defense of New Orleans. Jackson's 
troops were still unconcentrated. If the British had proceeded 
immediately to the attack, New Orleans must have fallen. As 
it was, Colonel Thornton advanced with 1600 men to within 
seven miles of the helpless city. But his superior. General 
Keane. decided to wait for Pakenham to arrive and assume 
direction of the campaign. Jackson rose to the dangerous 
situation with magnificent energy and courage. He concen- 
trated his troops, constructed his Hues of defense, located his 
guns, and disposed his forces with a promptness and skill which 
excited the admiration of his adversaries. He seemed to divine 
every movement of the British and was alert to take advantage 
of every weakness in their position. When Pakenham with 
great difficulty had got his heavy guns transported across the 
marshlands and set up against the American batteries, Jackson 
silenced them in an artillery battle on New Year's Day, 181 5, 
in which he showed superior tactics and marksmanship. A week 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 275 



later Pakenham threw his 5500 veterans against Jackson's 
works in a frontal attack, only to see them mown down like 
wheat by the unerring fire of the Kentucky and Tennessee 
riflemen. The victors of Vitoria broke and ran. Pakenham was 
killed by a grapeshot. Gibbs and Keane, the officers next in 
command, were struck down. Only Lambert of the major 
generals was left to conduct the retreat. The British losses on 
that famous January S, 181 5, were 2036 men as against 71 
for Jackson. The shattered British army reembarked on Lake 
Borgne and sailed away to the eastward. Jackson entered the 
city of New Orleans on the twenty-first, acclaimed by shouts of 
triumph, which were echoed fourteen years later from the east 
front of the White House, when the ^^hero of New Orleans" was 
inaugurated president of the United States. 

Had the Atlantic cable been in existence then, the battle of 
New Orleans would not have been fought, for the evening be- 
fore Pakenham arrived to take command of the operations on 
the Mississippi the British and American commissioners at 
Ghent had signed a treaty of peace (December 24, 1814). 
From the moment England repealed her Orders in Council 
(five days after the declaration of war) there had been dis- 
cussions of peace. Jonathan Russell, our charge d'affaires in 
London, approached Lord Castlereagh, and at the same time 
the British admiral Warren wrote from Halifax to Monroe on 
the subject of an armistice in September, 181 2. But Monroe 
replied to Warren that an abandonment of the right of im- 
pressment was an ^indispensable condition" of peace, and 
Castlereagh replied to Russell that England would never 
abandon that ancient and accustomed practice." Then Czar 
Alexander of Russia, who had brought the wrath of Napoleon 
down on his head by refusing to adhere to the Continental 
System, intervened to secure the full cooperation of his new 
ally England. In September, 181 2, his chancellor offered the 
friendly mediation of Russia to our minister at St. Petersburg, 
John Quincy Adams. Madison hastened to accept this offer 
in the spring of 1813 and appointed Secretary Gallatin and 
Senator Bayard of Delaware to join Adams in the negotiations 



276 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



at the Russian capital. They sailed in May. Castlereagh, 
however, declined the Czar's offer of mediation, indicating his 
willingness to treat directly with American commissioners at 
London, or at Gothenburg, Sweden. Again Madison welcomed 
the invitation and added the names of Henry Clay and Jonathan 
Russell to the group of envoys (January 14, 1814).^ Our for- 
tunes were very low in 1814. Our victories on the sea had 
ceased, and our navy was fast disappearing from the ocean. 
There was disharmony in the cabinet and great discontent in the 
country. Our foreign trade was almost annihilated. The cur- 
rency was in the gravest disorder. The country's specie was 
rapidly accumulating in New England, where disaffection with 
the war was at its height. The Treasury asked for $40,000,000, 
a sum greater than the total issue of bank notes in the country. 
No effort availed to raise the voluntary enlistments above 
35,000 men, which seemed a petty number when compared 
with the forces which England was preparing to send over on 
the final defeat of Napoleon. When, therefore, the commis- 
sioners met at Ghent, in the Netherlands, to begin negotiations 
(August 8, 1 8 14), the cards in the hands of our envoys were 
pretty poor. In London, on the other hand, there was con- 
fidence. The alhes were in Paris. Napoleon had abdicated. 
The British war office was preparing the expedition which was 
to chastise the Americans into submission, and the English 
press was heaping insults on the despot" Madison, the ^'con- 
temptible tool of Bonaparte." 

The instructions to the British envoys at Ghent reflected the 
spirit of the country. The Americans must cede land in Maine 
and upper New York to give the British direct connections 
between Halifax and Quebec and the control of both banks of 

1 Gallatin, after his departure for St. Petersburg, was rejected by the Senate, on 
the ground that he could not combine a cabinet office with a diplomatic mission, 
though Jay in 1794 and Ellsworth in 1799 had served on foreign embassies while 
in the office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. When Gallatin resigned the 
Treasury portfolio, he was promptly confirmed. The delay caused his name to 
be placed at the bottom of the list of envoys, but his experience and tact made 
him the acknowledged leader in all the negotiations. 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 



277 



the St. Lawrence. The Lakes too were to be British, no Amer- 
ican posts to be allowed on their shores or American ships on 
their waters. From the Sandusky to the Mississippi the Western 
territory, reclaimed by the victories of Perry and Harrison, was 
to be formed into an Indian state. We were to be excluded 
from the Newfoundland fisheries, on the ground that the war 
had abrogated the treaty of 1783. No concessions were to be 
made on the matters which occupied the main place in the 
American instructions — impressments, the blockade, and in- 
demnity for maritime depredations. The American commis- 
sioners, despairing of reaching any terms which we could 
accept, were prepared to leave Ghent, when the scene changed 
suddenly. Late in October the news of our victories reached 
Europe: how Drummond had been repulsed on the banks of 
the Niagara ; how MacDonough had destroyed the British fleet 
on Lake Champlain; how Prevost had retreated from Platts- 
burg; how Ross's army had failed before Baltimore and left 
Chesapeake Bay. At the same time, the negotiations of the 
great European congress at Vienna, which Castlereagh was 
attending in person, took an alarming turn and threatened the 
renewal of a general European war. Point by point the gov- 
ernment at London receded from its high demands, while the 
American cabinet dropped the impressment question as a sine 
qua non of peace.^ It still took weeks of patient negotiation, in 
which Gallatin found the difficulty of reconciling the conflicting 
interests of Adams and Clay in the Newfoundland fisheries 
and in the navigation of the Mississippi even greater than 
the difficulty of agreeing with the British envoys, before the 
treaty was actually signed on Christmas Eve. Its ten articles 

^It is still commonly taught in our schools that impressment was the chief 
cause of the War of 1812. But in reality it was the failure of the British govern- 
ment to revoke the Orders in Council that we made the casus belli. After the war 
was begun Madison continued it on the issue of impressment — for the Orders 
were repealed at the very outbreak of the war. The cabinet did not drop the ques- 
tion of impressments (as a condition of peace or even of an armistice) until the end 
of June, 1814. England maintained the right of impressment as long as she held to 
the doctrine of "indefeasible allegiance." An act of Parliament reasserted the right 
in 1835, and Daniel Webster was still discussing it with Lord Ashburton in 1842. 



2 78 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



provided for nothing more than the cessation of hostihties and 
the return to the status before the war, leaving the questions 
of boundaries, fisheries, and the navigation of the Mississippi 
open for future adjustment. Impressment was passed over in 
silence. The treaty reached Washington on February 14 and 
three days later was ratified by the unanimous vote of the 
Senate. It was received with demonstrations of joy on both 
sides of the Atlantic, for, except with a few extremists, the war 
had not been popular in either country. The real cause of the 
war was Napoleon Bonaparte, for he was the real enemy in both 
hemispheres. With his fall fell the policies which had been 
reared to resist his unholy ambition. Orders and Decrees, 
embargoes and nonintercourse, blockades and impressments, 
ceased. There was no reason for either England or America 
to continue the war. For England it would have meant the 
addition of tens of millions of pounds to her enormous war debt, 
the continued exposure of her shipping to the American pri- 
vateers which already virtually blockaded her home waters,^ 
and the dispatch of expedition after expedition to a theater of 
war three thousand miles distant, for the questionable satis- 
faction of ^'punishing" a despised enemy or rectifying" the 
Canadian border. For America it would have meant the risk 
of bankruptcy, or even the dissolution of the national govern- 
ment, for the sake of forcing Great Britain to deny in principle 
an abuse which had ceased in practice. 

^Over 500 American privateers were sent out to prey on British commerce 
during the war. These swift, daring vessels infested the shores of the British 
Isles, sending insurance rates up to ruinous figures. A memorial of the Glasgow 
merchants and shippers to the prince regent in September, 1814, shows how 
serious the danger was : ''In the short space of two years above 800 [ships] have 
been taken by that power whose maritime strength we have hitherto held in 
contempt. It is distressing, it is mortifying, that at a time when we are at peace 
with all the rest of the world, when we have declared the whole American coast 
under blockade, when we pay so heavy a tax for protection in the form of con- 
voy duty, and our navy costs so great a sum, we cannot traverse our own Chan- 
nel in safety nor effect insurance without excessive premiums, and that a horde 
of American cruisers, unheeded, unresisted, unmolested, seize, burn, sink, destroy 
our ships in our own inlets and in sight of our own harbours." 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 279 



That national bankruptcy and dissolution were imminent 
was the conviction of many, and even the gratification of some. 
Senator Pickering of Massachusetts wrote in January, 181 5, 
before the news of Jackson's victory had reached the East: 
^'If the British succeed in their expedition against New Orleans 
(and if they have tolerable leaders I see no reason to doubt 
of their success), I shall consider the Union severed. I do not 
expect to see a single representative in the next Congress from 
the Western states." Disaffection had been constant in New 
England since the beginning of ^'Mr. Madison's war." Ex- 
press your sentiments without fear," said an address of the 
Massachusetts General Court to the people of the state, ^'and 
let the sound of your disapproval of this war be loud and 
deep. ... If your sons must be torn from you by conscription, 
consign them to the care of God, but let there be no volunteering 
except for defensive war." The New England governors re- 
fused to furnish militia for the invasion of Canada, their bankers 
declined to subscribe to national loans ^^to heat the war poker," 
their merchants speculated in British bills of exchange, and 
their farmers supplied the armies in Canada with beef and 
grain. When the government returned to Washington in the 
autumn of 18 14, the ruins amid which it sat down were a 
symbol of its own condition. The Treasury borrowed paltry 
sums of the local bankers of Georgetown to meet pressing bills. 
Not only the New England States but New York, Pennsylvania, 
Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky began to raise armies for 
their own defense. ^^The states must and will take care of 
themselves," said Congressman Miller of New York. 

A call went out from the legislature of Massachusetts to the 
other New England States, in October, 18 14, for a convention 
of delegates ^'to unite in such measures for our safety as the 
times demand and the principles of justice and the law of self- 
preservation will justify." Connecticut and Rhode Island 
responded promptly, and twenty-three delegates (later joined 
by three members from Vermont and New Hampshire) met 
at Hartford, December 15, 18 14. For three weeks they sat 



2 8o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

behind closed doors, secrecy giving the air of conspiracy to their 
dehberations. There were wild rumors abroad of the seces- 
sion of New England and her alliance with Great Britain. But 
when the debates were published some years later, they proved 
to be no more treasonable than the Virginia and Kentucky 
Resolutions of 1798. The convention declared that when there 
were deliberate, dangerous, and palpable infractions of the 
Constitution" it was the right and duty of the states to "inter- 
pose their authority for the preservation of their liberties." It 
resolved that the states represented should take steps to pro- 
tect their citizens from conscription by act of Congress and to 
secure the right to divert, for the support of armies raised in 
the state for the defense of its own territory, a part of the 
federal revenue collected in the states. It also recommended 
amendments to the Constitution omitting slaves from the census 
on which representation and direct taxes are based ; requiring 
a two-thirds vote of Congress to admit new states, impose com- 
mercial restrictions, or declare war ; excluding naturalized citi- 
zens from federal office ; limiting the president to a single term ; 
and prohibiting the election of two persons in succession from 
the same state. The hostility to the South and the "Virginia 
dynasty" of presidents in these proposed amendments to the 
Constitution is obvious. Three envoys were appointed to carry 
the resolutions of the convention to Washington to "negotiate" 
with the federal government. They learned on their way of 
Jackson's victory at New Orleans, and arrived in Washington 
together with the messenger who brought the news of the peace 
treaty of Ghent. Amid the general rejoicing the "ambassa- 
dors" from New England slipped out of the capital as quietly 
as they had come in, and nothing more was heard of the "states' 
rights" doctrine of New England Federalism. 

There is little reason for Americans to be proud of the War 
of 1 81 2. Although Madison, in transmitting the treaty of peace 
to the Senate, spoke exuberantly of our success as the "natural 
result of the wisdom of legislative councils, of the patriotism 
of the people, of the public spirit of the militia, and the valor 
of the military and naval forces of the country," every historical 



THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 281 



scholar knows that the sober truth of the matter is summed 
up in Admiral Mahan's characterization: ^'a record upon the 
whole of gloom, desertion, and governmental incompetence, re- 
sulting from the lack of national preparation." The military 
significance of the war was trifling, the armies were small, and 
the total losses in killed and wounded were less than 5000 in 
a population of 8,000,000. The enemy never penetrated more 
than twenty-five or thirty miles into our territory and, except 
for Washington, never held one of our cities for a day. Never- 
theless, the effects of the war upon our political, economic, and 
social life were far-reaching. America struck out on a new 
path in 181 5 — the path of full autonomy and quickened na- 
tional consciousness. Since the beginning of Washington's 
second administration we had been in a state of semicolonial 
dependence on the Old World. Our parties had been English and 
French, ^'Anglomen" and Jacobins." The actions of Pitt and 
Talleyrand, of Canning and Napoleon, had dictated our policies. 
Adjustment to European conditions had been our chief concern. 
We had made seven treaties with foreign nations within the 
period 1 794-1814. But in 181 5 all this changed suddenly. We 
turned our back on Europe and began to grapple with the prob- 
lems of our national life and the development of our national 
domain. Embargo, nonintercourse, blockade, and war had al- 
most ruined our shipping. Large sums of money were already 
finding employment in manufacturing industries. In 181 5 New 
England had $40,000,000 invested in cotton factories alone, 
which handled 27,000,000 pounds of raw cotton. The war had 
revealed the need for a stable currency, a dependable revenue, 
a national army, adequate defenses on the frontiers and the 
coasts, canals and roads to bind the sections of the country 
into a real Union. 

But, most important of all, the strong particularistic senti- 
ment that had been brought out by the war aroused the country 
to the danger of the dissipation of political power to which the 
doctrine of states' rights might lead. The fate of our national 
government hung in the balance at the close of the year 1814. 
*'The shock of a severe defeat at New Orleans," says Professor 



282 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Babcock, ^^or a complete rupture at Ghent, might have loosed 
even the slender ties holding the administration together, and 
sent the fragments of a discredited government flying from 
the capital, just as the march of the British had dispersed the 
President and his cabinet in the preceding summer." The 
revolution of 1800," which had brought Jefferson into power, 
had been based on distrust of a strong central government. It had 
heralded democracy — but a democracy which was suspicious 
of nationalism. Political power should be strongest in the local 
centers and delegated with decreasing confidence to the remoter 
^^higher" authorities. But the actual management of govern- 
ment had taught the Republican statesmen, beginning with Jef- 
ferson himself, the impracticability of their theory, and the 
stress of war had completed the lesson. By 181 5 the Repub- 
licans had abandoned every point of opposition to a supreme 
national power. The presidents had issued proclamations, and 
their Congresses had revived whole systems of Federalist tax- 
ation. The words spoken by Jefferson in the generous rhetoric 
of his first inaugural were now true in fact : there were no longer 
Republicans and Federalists, for the Republicans had put on 
Federalism. Democracy and nationalism were joined in a 
happy union, destined to inspire the coming generation to 
wonderful accomplishments in the name of the new America. 
The one-time author of the Virginia Resolutions wrote the pro- 
gram of the new age in his annual message to Congress in 
December, 181 5 — a liberal provision for national defense, new 
frigates for the navy, a standing army, national aid for the 
construction of roads and canals, encouragement to manufac- 
tures by a protective tariff, and even the reestablishment of a 
National Bank. All of this was ^^for the great object of ena- 
bling the political authority of the Union to employ promptly 
and effectually the physical power of the Union in the cases 
designated by the Constitution." The Jeffersonian era was 
closed. 



CHAPTER VI 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 

Europe extends to the Alleghenies, America lies beyond. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Expansion — Political, Industrial, and Territorial 

The keynote of the period of American history from the 
close of the second war with England to the presidency of 
Andrew Jackson is expansion — the amplification of the power 
of the central government in acts of Congress and decisions of 
the Supreme Court, the development of industry in manufac- 
tures and agriculture, and the extension of our frontier beyond 
the Mississippi. This triple process of political, economic, and 
geographical adjustment brought new forces into play in our 
American life and raised the problems of states' rights, pro- 
tectionism, the status of territories, internal improvements, 
sectional rivalries, and slavery, which characterize the years 
1815-1860 — the middle period" of our history. 

The response of the Republican Congress to Madison's mes- 
sage of December 5, 181 5, was prompt and hearty, and no less 
hearty was the response of the country to the measures of Con- 
gress. If traces of that suspicion of the abuse of power in the 
hands of the central government which had been the creed of the 
Jeffersonian party of 1800 still remained, they were confined to 
the few ^^old Republicans," like John Randolph of Roanoke, — 
belated voices crying in the wilderness. The Republican party 
had put off its particularism and become strongly national- 
istic. As Josiah Quincy remarked, with a tinge of sarcasm in 
his congratulation, it had ^^out-Federalized FederaHsm." No 
sooner was the President's message read than a committee of 
Congress, headed by John C. Calhoun, was appointed to deal 

283 



284 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



with the pressing question of our currency. It reported a bill 
for the establishment of a National Bank with a capital of 
$35,000,000, whose stock should be subscribed to partly in coin 
and partly in the funded debt of the United States and whose 
notes should be receivable for all dues to the government. The 
Bank was to be exempt from taxation and was to hold the 
government balances free of interest. In return for these favors 
it was to transfer public funds from point to point without 
brokerage charges, lend the government sums up to $500,000, 
and pay a bonus of $1,500,000 for its charter, which was to 
run twenty years. The United States should own one fifth of 
the Bank's stock and appoint one fifth of the board of directors. 

Southern statesmen had opposed the establishment of Hamil- 
ton's Bank a quarter of a century earlier, on the ground that 
it was an undue extension of the powers necessary and proper" 
to carry out the functions given to Congress by the Constitu- 
tion, but Calhoun now declared that any discussion of the 
constitutional aspect of the case was ^^a useless consumption of 
time." Henry Clay had argued against the recharter of the 
old Bank in 181 1, but now he descended from the Speaker's 
chair to urge the charter of the new Bank, confessing that he 
was ^Villing to sacrifice the pride of consistency rather than the 
welfare of the country." The Republican press Hterally took a 
leaf from Hamilton's book of politics by reprinting his argu- 
ments for the charter of the Bank advanced in 1 791. The Bank 
bill passed the House by a vote of 80 to 69^ the Senate con- 
curred, and President Madison, ^^surmounting the prejudices 
of a lifetime," signed the bill on April 10, 181 6. Early the next 
year the Bank went into operation, rapidly extending its busi- 
ness to nineteen branch establishments in the various states. 
Although the Bank was neither very wisely nor very honestly 
managed in the first two years, its beneficent influence on the 
currency of the country was felt immediately. The state banks, 
which had increased from fewer than 100 in 181 1 to nearly 
300 in 1 81 6 and which had flooded the country with notes whose 
value diminished from New England southward and westward, 
were obliged to resume specie payment by February 20, 181 7, 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



285 



on pain of having whatever government deposits they held 
withdrawn. In the three years following the establishment of 
the Bank the amount of state bank notes decreased over 40 
per cent, being replaced by the uniform, specie-based notes of 
the Bank of the United States.^ Secretary Alexander J. Dallas, 
to whose genius and energy this reorganization of our fiscal 
system was chiefly due, retired from the Treasury in 181 6, 
handing over to his successor, William H. Crawford, a surplus 
of $20,000,000.^ 

Seventeen days after the Bank bill became law Madison 
signed another bill, which gave even stronger proof of the new 
nationalistic spirit. Embargo, nonintercourse, and war had vir- 
tually ruined American shipping. Our foreign trade dropped 
from $246,800,000 in 1807 to $19,800,000 in 1814. Capital to 
the amount of some $100,000,000 was diverted into manufac- 
tures. A memorial presented to Congress by the New England 
manufacturers in December, 181 5, recounted the progress of 
the cotton and woolen industries in that section. There were 
already 140 cotton mills within a radius of thirty miles of 
Providence, Rhode Island. Pioneer industries had been car- 
ried across the Alleghenies to the Ohio valley, where cotton 
and woolen mills and factories for the manufacture of their 
machinery were found scattered from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. 
When the war ended, England began dumping" the accumu- 
lated products of her factories on the American market at 
ominously cheap prices, ^^in order," as Lord Brougham said 

^The state banks had issued some $170,000,000 of paper currency, based on 
not more than $15,000,000 of specie in their vaults. When all the banks south 
and west of New England suspended specie payment (that is, redemption of their 
notes in coin), in the autumn of 1814, these notes became practically "bUls of 
credit," whose issue is expressly forbidden to the states by the Constitution. 
Like bills of credit, they depreciated, passing at different values in different parts 
of the country. Only in New England, where the banks still paid specie, were 
the notes at par. The contamination of this depreciated currency added to the 
weakness of the country in 1814-1815, causing the United States Treasury notes 
also to decline and fluctuate in credit. 

2 It is a singular fact that the three greatest Secretaries of the Treasury in our 
history before the Civil War were all aliens : Hamilton and Dallas were bom 
in the British West Indies, Gallatin in Switzerland. 



286 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



in Parliament^ ^'to stifle in the cradle those rising manufactures 
in the United States which the war has forced into exist- 
ence, contrary to the natural course of things" — the natural 
course being England's continued monopoly of the Amer- 
ican trade. In a single year England sent $90,000,000 of mer- 
chandise to our shores. Crates of earthenware and bales of 
cotton goods, piled on the docks of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and 
New York, were sold to eager bidders at auction. Over $450,000 
was realized from a single week's sale, and the receipts of 
the New York customhouse from April to June, 181 5, were 
almost $4,000,000. To what end had we finally accomplished 
our political independence of the Old World if we were now to 
be made an economic satellite of Great Britain! How could 
we maintain our dignity as a nation if we were to remain de- 
pendent on foreign countries for the necessities and comforts 
of life! Even the Virginians of the old school joined the 
enthusiastic prophets of the younger generation — like Clay, 
Lowndes, Calhoun, Grundy, and Porter — in their demand for 
national encouragement to the development of our national 
industries. Jefferson, who, in his Notes on Virginia," had 
urged that ^^our workshops should remain in Europe," lest the 
introduction of their industrial proletarians should substitute 
the corrupting influences of the cities for the Arcadian virtues 
of agriculture in our land, now declared himself in favor of 
domestic manufactures, to save us from the alternative of being 
reduced to dependence on a foreign country or ^Ho be clothed in 
skins and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns." Madison 
recommended protection to home industries in his last two mes- 
sages to Congress, and Monroe echoed the same sentiments in 
his inaugural address. 

It was in response to this demand for economic self- 
sufficiency, rather than as a deliberate favor to the newly 
established industries, that Congress, in the spring of 181 6, 
passed a tariff bill continuing, and even slightly enhancing, the 
"double duties" levied for the support of the war. Iron, glass, 
hardware, pottery, leather, and woolens profited by the new 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



287 



tariff, but cotton was the chief beneficiary. No other industry 
had made such rapid progress. Thanks to the improvement of 
the cotton gin, the spinning jenny, and the power loom, our mills 
consumed 90,000 bales of cotton in the year 181 5, as against 
ICQ bales a decade earlier, and turned out a product worth 
$9,000,000. To prevent the competition of the cheap fabrics 
from India, worth as low as 6 cents a yard, the bill of 181 6 
provided that no imported cotton would be rated at less than 
2 5 cents a yard in the tariff schedule. The bill was reported by 
a committee whose chairman (Lowndes) and a majority of 
whose members were Southerners, and it was supported in 
every state of the Union except North Carolina and Louisiana. 
There were no constitutional objections raised. The bill 
was a measure of national preparedness. Only a few men, 
like John Randolph and McDuffie, called attention in vain to 
the truth (which was later realized by all the statesmen of the 
South) that it favored the manufacturer at the expense of the 
farmer. ^^I lay the claims of the manufacturer entirely out of 
view," replied Calhoun; ^'it is the duty of the country as a 
means of defense to encourage the domestic industry of the 
country." The bill, he thought, would bind the different sec- 
tions of our rapidly growing country together, and this mutual 
dependence would be the surest guaranty against that direst of 
all dangers that could threaten us — disunion. 

Other measures testifying to the new spirit of nationalism 
were passed immediately on the close of the war. To avoid a 
repetition of the humiliating experience of relying on an un- 
reliable militia. Congress voted to maintain a regular army of 
10,000 men, with Jacob Brown and Andrew Jackson as major 
generals for the Northern and Southern sections respectively. 
While such important points as boundaries, fishing-rights, the 
West Indian trade, and impressments were left unsettled by the 
peace, there was no guaranty that the peace would be per- 
manent or of long duration. We were pledged, as Secretary 
Monroe said in 181 5, ^Ho maintain our rank among the nations." 
Jefferson's gunboats were ordered to be sold, and appropriations 



288 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



were made for new warships to guard our coasts and our ship- 
ping effectively. Two hundred thousand dollars a year for three 
years was voted for the purchase of ship timber alone. Al- 
together the appropriations for army and navy reached some 
$4,500,000. Our coast defenses were strengthened, our interior 
forts remanned and reprovisioned, taxes levied on foreign ton- 
nage in our ports, and our coastwise trade confined to ships of 
American registry. 

The acceptability of the new Republican program of nation- 
alism to the country at large w^as shown by the presidential 
election of 181 6. Backed by the influence of President Madison, 
James Monroe, Secretary of State, secured the Republican 
nomination over his colleague in the cabinet, William H. Craw- 
ford of Georgia, in a very ^^thin" caucus of Congress, by the 
narrow vote of 65 to 54. Monroe was not a man of first-rate 
ability, like Jefferson, but his patriotism, openness, industry, 
and intellectual patience were unquestioned. He was plodding 
and visionless, too opinionated and insistent over small matters. 
His diplomatic record at the three courts of Paris, Madrid, and 
London left much to be desired. His Federalist rival, Rufus 
King of New York, was an abler statesman, but his weakness 
was the weakness of declining Federalism, while Monroe's 
strength was the strength of the new national Republicanism. 
The Federalists were under no illusions as to the desperate con- 
dition of their party — the party of the Hartford Convention, 
of opposition to the war, of antagonism to the admission of 
Louisiana, and of hostility to the growing West. ^'If we can- 
not make any impression upon the presidential election at this 
time," wrote Timothy Pickering to King, ^^I see no hope for the 
future." King himself had abandoned hope after his unsuccess- 
ful canvass for the governorship of New York in the spring of 
181 6. He spoke of his candidacy as ^^a fruitless struggle." He 
even confessed that it was ^Hhe real interest and policy of the 
country that the Democracy should pursue its natural course." 
"Federalists of our age," he said, "must be content with the 
past." All that remained to them, he said to his son Edward, 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



was "to support the least wicked section of Republicans in 
case of division among them." The election of November con- 
firmed King's gloomy prophecy. He received only 34 electo- 
ral votes from the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and 
Delaware. The other nineteen states cast their 183 votes for 
Monroe. 

A few weeks after his inauguration President Monroe set 
out for a tour of the North and West for the ostensible purpose 
of inspecting the national defenses. As he journeyed north- 
ward through Baltimore, Philadelphia, Trenton, and New York 
he was received with enthusiastic demonstrations of welcome, 
which rose to such a pitch when he reached New England that 
^^a humorous cynic compared the scene to the adoration of the 
Wise Men of the East." Hartford, only eighteen months earlier 
the seat of the convention which had been bent on wresting the 
control of the government from the hands of the "Virginia 
dynasty," now hailed this Virginian president as the "political 
father and guide" and assured him that party spirit no longer 
rendered "alien to each other those who ought to be bound 
together by fraternal affection." In Boston, the very citadel 
of Federalism, the public authorities and the press vied with 
each other in heaping honors upon this intimate friend of 
Jefferson's, who had contributed so much to the conduct of 
"Mr. Madison's war." The Boston Centinel, which had ap- 
peared edged in mourning when Jefferson was elected to the 
presidency, spoke of Monroe's visit as a jubilee which ushered 
in "an era of good feelings." Monroe took up the phrase and 
repeated it as he journeyed northward to Portsmouth, then 
across the states of New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York to 
Ogdensburg, and thence by the St. Lawrence and the Lakes to 
Buffalo and Detroit. The phrase caught the fancy of the 
American people too and has served ever since to designate 
the period of Monroe's presidency. 

In spite of the festive optimism with which it had been ush- 
ered in, however, Monroe's term of office was anything but an 
era of good feelings. With the burden of foreign war removed, 



290 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



with our manufactures encouraged and our trade improved,^ 
with our Treasury filled - and the Indian danger removed so that 
the pioneers could safely move to the Mississippi and beyond, 
up the valley of the Missouri, there emerged a number of prob- 
lems and sectional interests which had been seen only dimly 
before the war. Since by far the most important of these prob- 
lems were raised by the development of the country west of the 
Alleghenies, we must now turn our attention to that region. 

No other single factor in American life has had so continuous 
and decisive an influence as our ever-westward-moving frontier. 
Already in the colonial days there had developed a marked 
contrast between the merchants and planters on the Atlantic 
coast and the pioneer farmers of the ^^back country," whom the 
call of cheaper land, the love of adventure, the desire to escape 
debts and taxes, and the determination to be rid of the 
aristocratic pretensions of the ruling propertied classes drove 
westward under the urge of that same ^'rude impulse" which 
had sent their fathers across the sea. In the same year that the 
French relinquished their claims to the west of the Alleghe- 
nies, stretching ^'all down at the back of our colonies," King 
George III drew the Proclamation Line along the crest of the 
mountains and forbade the colonists to cross it into the Indian 
lands (1763). But King George's decree was no more effective 
than King Canute's. Pioneers from Virginia and the Carolinas 
followed Boone, Robertson, and Harrod across the Alleghe- 
nies and down the westward-flowing rivers into Kentucky and 
Tennessee. Others left the rocky farms of New England for 
the rich river bottoms of the Ohio. Before the inauguration 
of Washington over 100,000 settlers had entered the Western 
country, and a number of new states had been projected (Van- 
dalia, Transylvania, Westsylvania, Franklin) within the limits 
of western Pennsylvania and Virginia and the present states 
of Kentucky and Tennessee. 

^Our exports for 181 5 were $52,500,000, and our imports $103,000,000. The 
figures for 1816 were $81,000,000 and $147,000,000 respectively. 

2 Dallas estimated the customs receipts for 1816 at $13,000,000. They actually 
were $39,000,000. 




Projects for New \"\'esterx States in the 
Revolutionary Epoch 



292 THE UNITED STATES OF A:\IERICA 



The conditions of life beyond the mountains tended to 
enhance the spirit of self-reHance and adventurous enterprise 
which had caused these pioneers to separate from their brothers 
on the seaboard. Not only did they have to employ constant 
vigilance in defending their families against the Indians and in 
getting a living from the inhospitable forest, but they showed 
this same vigilance in their political life. They were a new 
band of immigrants, carrying a new Declaration of Independ- 
ence into the Western land.^ They formed ^'bodies politic," 
^^associations/' societies" for their own and the public good," 
petitioning the old states within whose limits they were to 
recognize them and take them under their protection. They 
realized that the}^ were the heralds of an American empire, 
^^erecting," as one of their leaders said, ^^the corner-stone of 
an edifice, the height and magnificence of whose superstructure 
is now in the womb of futurity." But they were looked upon 
by the older communities, which they had left, as groups of mal- 
contents, ^'lawless mobs," ''hordes of bandits." ''land pirates." 
Their departure was sometimes deplored as a secession, weak- 
ening the political authority and disturbing the economic sta- 
bilit}^ of the states, and sometimes welcomed as a relief to 
the ^' sober and well-disposed" people whom they left behind. 
President Dwight of Yale College, in the "land of steady 
habits," thanked Providence for "opening in the vast western 
wilderness a retreat sufficiently alluring to draw them away 
from the land of their nativity." 

The tide of westward migration fluctuated with the political 
fortunes of the government. During the period of general war 
in Europe, and the consequent expansion of the American 
carrying-trade from 1793 to 1807, there was sufficient demand 
for men and goods in our seaports to interrupt the migration 
to the West. But embargo, nonintercourse, and the virtual 
ruin of our trade in the second war with Great Britain again 

^It is interesting to compare the language of the convention which met to 
establish the new state of Franklin in 1785 with that of the Declaration of 
Independence. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



293 



turned men's eyes and feet across the mountains, where fine 
land was to be bought in quarter sections (160 acres) at two 
dollars an acre. The victories of Harrison north of the Ohio 
and of Jackson south of the Tennessee relieved the pressure 
from hostile Indians on our frontiers. The appearance of the 
steamboat on the Ohio and the Mississippi guaranteed the 
rapid development of the commerce of our great ^'hinterland" 
through the port of New Orleans. After the Treaty of Ghent 
a veritable exodus to the Western country began. The news- 
papers of the times, diaries and letters of travelers, prospec- 
tuses of land-booming companies, reports of committees of 
state legislatures — all testify to the steady stream of emigrants 
along the Western pikes and trails. They went on horseback 
or in big covered wagons, or som.etimes even walked, pushing 
before them rude carts piled high with their household goods 
and driving their cattle. In the year 181 7 a company of 120 
from Durham, Maine, started out to purchase a township in 
Indiana, following their pastor as the Massachusetts Puritans 
had followed Hooker to the Connecticut valley nearly two cen- 
turies before. The same year nearly 4000 emigrants from the 
Carolinas and Georgia met at Burnt Corn Springs, bound for 
the cotton lands on the Alabama River, with ''carts, sleighs, 
rigs, coaches, and waggons/' and fifty droves of cattle and hogs. 
The ranks of the emigrants were swollen by new immigrants 
from Europe, especially from Germany and the British Isles, 
where a period of acute industrial depression had followed the 
exertions of the long series of wars against Napoleon. An 
English traveler, himself among the stream of settlers of 181 7 
seeking a new home in the West, wrote in his "Notes on a 
Journey from Virginia to Illinois": "The old America seems 
to be breaking up and moving westward. We are seldom out 
of sight, as we travel on this grand track towards the Ohio, of 
family groups behind and before us." 

From New England to Georgia there were protests against 
this depletion of man power. The populous Atlantic states 
remained stationary while the Western communities grew some 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



50, some 100, and some 500 per cent in the few years imme- 
diately following the war/ ^'That alarming disease denomi- 
nated the Ohio fever," said the New Hampshire Supporter in 
181 7, ^'continues to rage in many parts of New England, by 
which vast numbers are taken off. In Connecticut it has spread 
to such a surprising extent that Governor Wolcott considers 
an investigation of the causes which produce it as by far the 
most important subject which can engage the attention of the 
legislature." Two years earlier a committee of the North Caro- 
lina legislature had complained that only 600,000 people were 
left in the state, while it was mortifying to see that thousands 
of rich and respectable citizens were moving west each year" 
to add to the 200,000 who had already removed to the waters 
of the Ohio and the Tennessee since the inauguration of General 
Washington." The Virginia legislature complained of ^Vasted 
and deserted fields, of dwellings abandoned ... of churches 
in ruins, because the fathers of the land are gone where another 
outlet to the ocean [the Mississippi] turns their thoughts from 
the place of their nativity and their affections from the haunts 
of their youth." 

It was inevitable that this rapid movement of population to 
the West should bring with it important consequences for our 
economic, political, and social life. The first effect was the 
awakening of our people to the need for adequate means of 
transportation for the development of the home miarket which 
grew up with the expanding surplus of agricultural products. 
The farmers of the Northwest sent their pork and beef, their 
butter, beans, corn, flour, cheese, apples, whisky, cider, and 
vinegar down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. 
In 1 81 8 there passed through that port 136,000 tons of prod- 
uce, valued at $16,771,711. Cattle and hogs to the number of 



^The following figures from the census reports are eloquent: 





jMassachusetts 


New York 


Virginia 


Indiana 


Missouri 


Mississippi 


I8IO 
1820 


472,040 
523,287 


959,049 
1,373,812 


974,600 
1,065,386 


24,520 
147,178 


19,783 
66,586 


40,352 
75,448 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



295 



100,000 were driven each year from Ohio, Indiana, and Ken- 
tucky to the seaboard, feeding on the way, to furnish meat for 
export and hides for the New England leather manufacturers. 
As the cotton-planters moved into the fresh lands of the South- 
west and built their plantation wharves along the banks of the 
Mississippi, they began to absorb the supplies of horses, mules, 
hay, and food that came down the river. More than half 
a million acres of public land were sold in Mississippi and 
Alabama in the year 1817. In 1810 over 90 per cent of our 
cotton crop was raised in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia ; 
but ten years later more than one third of the crop was grown 
in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. How to 
take advantage of the great market opening up in the West for 
the manufactures of the East, and at the same time to bind 
together the sections separated by the mountains, became the 
question of the hour. The sentiment of nationalism and the 
thirst for profits combined to stimulate the demand for internal 
improvements. The schemes of Jefferson and Gallatin for a 
great system of communication by roads and canals between 
the Eastern and the Western states were taken up anew and 
pushed vigorously in Congress and the state legislatures. 

A few illustrations will show the need for improved trans- 
portation facilities. Freight was drawn in heavy wagons by 
horses, mules, or oxen along poor roads at incredibly slow 
speed and high cost. From Baltimore to Cincinnati it took 
a month in transit and often cost $150 a ton. It cost so much 
to get a bushel of wheat from western Pennsylvania or New 
York to the seaboard that the farmer had little incentive to 
raise more than enough to satisfy his own needs and the scanty 
market in his vicinity. He saw the major part of the value 
both of the products which he sent eastward and of the imple- 
ments, clothing, and household articles which he bought in 
return go into the pockets of the teamsters. The roads in 
Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky were so poor that it did not pay 
to raise grain or tobacco fifty miles from a navigable river. 
A representative from the back country of Virginia, less than 
one hundred miles from the coast, declared in Congress that 



296 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



it cost the farmer in his district on the average one bushel of 
wheat to transport two to tidewater. 

Unless the farm products of Ohio were to seek outlet through 
the Lakes and the St. Lawrence via Montreal, enriching the 
British carrying-trade, and the whole wealth of the Mississippi 
Valley were to go down the river to New Orleans and the Gulf, 
to be competed for by British, French, and Spanish shipping, 
there must be inducement enough offered to the farmer to get 
his produce across the mountains to New York, Philadelphia, 
Baltimore, and Charleston. The clumsy method of sending 
freight from the Atlantic ports to Louisville, Cincinnati, and 
Pittsburgh via New Orleans could not be continued with profit 
to the shipper or the receiver. Peter B. Porter of New York, 
in a famous speech in Congress in 181 1, warned the country of 
the danger of the separation of the Union into an eastern and 
a western section unless measures were speedily taken to bind 
together the farmers on one side of the mountains and the 
manufacturers and merchants on the other. The clauses of the 
Constitution would be powerless to do this. Economic needs 
were stronger than poHtical theories: ^^It is by producing a 
mutual dependence of interests between these two great sec- 
tions, and by this means only, that the United States can ever 
be kept together." The bitter experiences of the war added 
force to Porter's warning. Even the fathers of the old Virginia 
school began to follow, though ^^with caution and good heed," 
the lead of the younger generation of Republicans, like Porter, 
Clay, and Calhoun. President Madison, in his last message to 
Congress, urged ^'the expediency of exercising their existing 
powers, and when necessary of resorting to the prescribed mode 
of enlarging them [by Constitutional amendments], in order 
to effectuate a comprehensive system of roads and canals such 
as will have the effect of drawing more closely together every 
part of our country by promoting intercourse and improvements 
and by increasing the share of every part in the common stock 
of national prosperity." 

A few days after Madison's message John C. Calhoun intro- 
duced a bill to commit the government to a generous and con- 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



297 



tinuous application of the public funds to the development of 
the West. He moved that the $1,500,000 bonus to be paid 
to the government for the charter of the new United States 
Bank, together with the annual interest on the government's 
$7,000,000 of stock in the Bank, be set apart as a fund for 
internal improvements. Not alone the prosperity of the farm- 
ers and the merchants but the strength and unity of the country 
were concerned in such a policy, he urged. Our vastness 
exposed us to the worst of all calamities — disunion. 

We are great and rapidly, I was about to say fearfully, growing. 
This is our pride and our danger, our weakness and our strength. . . . 
Let us bind the Republic together with roads and canals. Am I 
told that the Constitution does not give Congress the necessary 
power? ... I answer, I am no advocate of refined arguments on 
the Constitution ! That instrument was not intended as a thesis for 
the logician to exercise his ingenuity on. It ought to be construed 
into plain good sense. . . . ^Xongress shall have the power," says the 
Constitution, 'Ho provide for the common defense and general welfare 
of the country" . . . and as roads and canals will contribute to 
the general welfare, Congress may lay taxes and duties to pay for 
them. ... If we are restricted in the use of our money to the 
enumerated powers, on what principle can the purchase of Louisiana 
be justified? 

Calhoun^s bill passed the House in February, 181 7, by the 
close vote of 86 to 84, and the Senate by 20 to 15. It reached 
President Madison the day before his retirement from office 
(March 3). With the caution characteristic of the Jeffersonian 
school, Madison vetoed the bill, not because he disapproved of 
its object, but because of political scruples. He thought an 
amendment to the Constitution necessary to enable Congress to 
spend the public money in such wholesale fashion for purposes 
not enumerated among its powers. His successor, Monroe, 
was equally interested in the plan of improvements and equally 
cautious as to the method of putting it into operation. As there 
was no hope for obtaining the two-thirds vote in Congress 
to override the presidential veto, the agitation for internal 
improvements lapsed. When Monroe was succeeded by John 



298 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Quincy Adams, who was ready and anxious to put his name to 
such bills, sectional rivalries and jealousies had put an end 
to that generous enthusiasm for national expansion at national 
expense which had marked the years immediately following the 
Treaty of Ghent. The Calhoun of 1825 would have been the 
last man in the country to deliver the speech of the Calhoun 
of 1816. 

Constitutional scruples and economic theories, however, were 
not the only factors that entered into the debates aroused by 
the demand of the West for recognition of its growing interests. 
Thirty-four of the 41 votes of the New England States in the 
House, and all but one of their votes in the Senate, were cast 
against Calhoun's bill. Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware also 
registered about three fourths of their votes in the negative. 
The 84 votes in favor came almost wholly from the states west 
of the Alleghenies and from New York and Pennsylvania, 
whose interest in the region of the Great Lakes and the Ohio 
valley was obvious. In short, it was already a sectional issue, 
betraying the concern of the seaboard states, and especially of 
New England, lest the increasing West, by draining off their 
population, should displace their predominant influence in 
the nation's politics. Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts had 
protested on the floor of Congress against the admission of 
Louisiana in 181 1, declaring that such an action would be 
virtually a dissolution of the Union" and would justify the 
secession of the Eastern states. ^'You have no authority," he 
continued, ^'to throw the rights and liberties and property of 
this people into a hotch-potch with the wild man on the Missouri 
nor with the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo- 
Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask on the sands at the mouth 
of the Mississippi." ^'What will become of the old United 
States who first entered into the compact contained in the 
Constitution," cried his colleague Wheaton, ^^and for whose 
benefit alone that instrument was made and executed ? Instead 
of these new states being annexed to us, we shall be annexed 
to them, lose our independence, and become altogether subject 
to their control." Other New Englanders affected to despise 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



299 



rather than fear the voluntary exiles who joined the "thieves 
and insolvents'' in the "land beyond the Sabbath." "The 
people of the Atlantic states/' wrote Flint in his "Recollections 
of the Last Ten Years" (1826), "have not yet recovered from 
the horror inspired by the term ^Backwoodsman.' This prej- 
udice is especially strong in New England, and is more or less 
felt from Maine to Georgia." We shall note the effects of this 
social cleavage on our political and economic history when the 
unprecedented growth of our Western communities and the 
rapid addition of the states of Indiana (181 6), Mississippi 
(1817), Illinois (1818), Alabama (1819), and Missouri (1821) 
had made it complete. Here it is instructive to remember 
that the vote on Calhoun's Bonus bill was taken on the eve 
of Monroe's tour to consolidate the "era of good feelings." 
The new president's speeches on "the harmony of sentiment 
so extensively maintained." and his congratulations, at the 
opening of his first Congress^ on "the prosperity and happy 
condition of a country where local jealousies are rapidly yield- 
ing to more generous, enlarged, and enlightened views of na- 
tional policy," must be read in the light of the debates and 
the vote on the Bonus bill. 

A condition indispensable to the settlement of the West was 
the removal of the Indians. Our pioneers pressed steadily 
into the red man's hunting-grounds, making each treaty of ces- 
sion the vantage ground for new encroachments. The Indians, 
slow to understand that the cessions excluded them from the 
lands over which their fathers had roamed, were strengthened in 
their resistance to American advance by British commercial 
agents who wished to keep the fur trade in the channels of the 
Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. In General Harrison's opin- 
ion, it was due largely to British encouragement that Tecumseh 
had started the Indians of the Northwest on the warpath after 
the treaty of Fort Wayne (1809) had compelled them to part 
with some 3,000,000 acres of land in Indiana. At Ghent the 
British commissioners had demanded the erection of a buffer 
Indian state to the south of the Great Lakes and insisted that the 
Indians be admitted as parties to the treaty. But the Americans 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



were firm in the defense of their thousands of pioneers who had 
settled in Michigan, Indiana, and IlHnois. They would grant 
neither land nor recognition to the Indians, but only complete 
amnesty on the cessation of hostilities. The British reluc- 
tantly acquiesced. After the Treaty of Ghent was concluded, 
the Indians of the Northwest held a council at Detroit (1815), 
where Tecumseh's brother ^Hhe Prophet" solemnly buried the 
hatchet. The succeeding years saw the rapid extinguishment 
of Indian titles in the Northwest. More than one half the area 
of Illinois, one third the area of Indiana, and nearly one quarter 
the area of Ohio were ceded to the United States between 181 6 
and 1 81 9, with large tracts in southern Michigan. The new 
states of Indiana and Illinois came into the Union with all their 
rich lands either already under or soon to pass under the 
acknowledged authority of the white man. 

While the Indians north of the Ohio buried the hatchet and 
gave the land peace for nearly a score of years, the Treaty of 
Ghent only gave the occasion for fresh wars south of the 
Tennessee. It will be remembered that Andrew Jackson's 
treaty with the Creeks, after his punitive campaign of the 
summer of 18 14, had compelled them to surrender two thirds 
of their land in Alabama (p. 273). The exiles of the tribe took 
refuge with the Seminoles (^'wanderers") on the Florida strip 
south of the boundary of the United States. Here a British 
adventurer, Colonel Nichols, without the authorization of his 
government, took under his protection the Seminoles with their 
motley crew of allies, consisting of refugee Creeks and runaway 
negroes from the plantations of Georgia. He encouraged the 
Indians in the behef that the Treaty of Ghent restored the 
lands which they had surrendered in Alabama. He built a 
fort near the mouth of the Appalachicola and stocked it plenti- 
fully with arms and ammunition. Then he sailed for England, 
leaving negroes in possession of the fort, whence raiding parties 
issued to destroy the crops, steal the cattle, and massacre the 
inhabitants of Georgia and the Mississippi Territory. Reprisals 
naturally followed. The Americans threw a red-hot cannon 
ball into the fort, igniting several hundred barrels of gun- 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



301 



powder and blowing the whole ^^garrison" into eternity. A lit- 
tle later they wiped out the Indian village of Fowlton, whose 
inhabitants had fired on Major Triggs. The Indians retaHated 
by ambushing a boatload of Americans on the Appalachicola 
River and massacring men, women, and children with frightful 
barbarity. Thus the Seminole War was opened in the late 
autumn of 181 7. 

Andrew Jackson was the major general in command of the 
southern district of the United States. A letter was dispatched 
to him by Secretary of War Calhoun, on December 26, 181 7, 
ordering him to proceed to the scene of disturbances with the 
militia of Tennessee and Georgia, to pursue the Indians across 
the Spanish border if necessary in breaking up their marauding 
bands, but to respect the strongholds under the command of 
Spain. These orders crossed a letter from Jackson to Monroe 
advising the seizure of all East Florida as a guaranty for 
Spain's reparation of the outrages committed on American soil 
by Indians under her nominal control, and signifying his 
willingness, on a hint from the authorities at Washington, to 
reduce the Floridas to submission within sixty days. Monroe, 
having already sent the orders of December 26, put aside 
Jackson's more drastic plan without a reply; but Jackson 
claimed that before he had reached the Appalachicola River he 
had received a letter from Congressman Rhea of Tennessee with 
the authorization of the government to conquer the Floridas. 
Whatever the truth may be about the correspondence/ Jack- 
son was not the man to fight an Indian war in the cautious 
spirit of a diplomat. He not only pursued the enemy into 
Spanish territory, but he seized the forts of St. Marks and 
Pensacola in defiance of their Spanish governors, garrisoned 
them with American troops, and raised the American flag over 
every important post in Florida except St. Augustine.^ He 
seized two British subjects, Arbuthnot and Ambrister, tried 

^The student will find a full discussion of President Monroe and the Rhea 
letter in James Schouler's ''History of the United States," Vol. Ill, p. 83. 

2 He ordered General Gaines to capture St. Augustine, but the order reached 
Washington and was countermanded. 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



them by court-martial, shot one and hanged the other at the 
yardarm of his own trading-schooner. By the end of May, 
1818, Jackson had finished his work and was on his way back 
to Nashville to be feted as the hero and idol of the West. He 
left Florida subdued to the power of the United States, but 
his precipitate campaign had raised embarrassments for the 
administration which absorbed the attention of the country 
for months to come. 

As the reports of the events in Florida reached Washington 
they stirred amazement and indignation^ admiration and per- 
plexity. Relief for the security of our southern border was 
balanced by anxiety for the offense given to the friendly powers 
of Spain and Great Britain. Don Luis de Onis, the Spanish 
minister, in high dudgeon, demanded the prompt restitution 
of St. Marks, Pensacola, Barrancas, and all other places wrested 
by General Jackson from the crown of Spain'' and the punish- 
ment of the general and his officers. The President and the 
cabinet agreed that Jackson had exceeded his instructions of 
December 26, and instructions were sent to the commanders 
at the forts to deliver them over on the arrival of a Spanish 
force strong enough to curb the Indians. Monroe thought that 
Jackson's ^Var against Spain" should be disavowed. Calhoun 
was in favor of punishing him for insubordination. John 
Quincy Adams was the only member of the cabinet to uphold 
the general's actions. He maintained that Jackson had not 
waged war against Spain, but that he had seized the forts in 
self-defense in obedience to his orders to pursue the Indians 
into Spanish territory and terminate their depredations. If 
Spanish authority had suffered in Florida, it was but a just 
retribution on Spain for failing to use her power to control 
the Indian and negro hordes, as she had solemnly promised to 
do in the treaty of 1795. When the ministry at Madrid renewed 
the demand of De Onis for the disavowal of Jackson's behavior 
and the punishment of the ^'haughty invader/' Adams sent an 
ultimatum instead of an apology to the Spanish court. He 
reviewed the long course of outrages on American life and 
property, permitted and even abetted by Spanish authority; 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



303 



justified Jackson's behavior ^^by all the laws of prudence and 
humanity"; and closed with a sharp summons to Spain to 
cease to speak in the language of injured pride and to make 
her choice immediately ^'either to place in Florida a force 
adequate at once to the protection of her territory and the ful- 
filment of her engagements, or to cede to the United States 
a province of which she retains nothing but the nominal pos- 
session, but which is in fact a derelict open to the occupancy 
of every enemy, civilized and savage, of the United States." 

King Ferdinand of Spain was powerless to meet the chal- 
lenge. Restored to the throne of Madrid on the collapse of 
Napoleon's power, he found the Spanish colonies in America 
in full revolt and his own kingdom torn between the aristo- 
cratic and priestly advocates of his policy of reaction and the 
adherents of the liberal ^^revolutionary" constitution of 181 2. 
Moreover, the British commercial interests were exerting pres- 
sure on Parliament to prevent that restoration of Spain's colo- 
nial empire which would interrupt the lucrative trade opened 
to them by the revolutions in Central and South America. 
Since Florida was slipping from his grasp, Ferdinand wisely 
decided to make such profit as he could out of its loss. On 
February 22, 1819, his minister at Washington signed a treaty 
surrendering East and West Florida to the United States on 
condition that our government would accept responsibility up 
to $5,000,000 for claims of American citizens against Spain, 
for depredations committed since the opening of the Napoleonic 
wars. By the same treaty a line was drawn fixing the boundary 
between the United States and Spain on the west and south 
of the l ouisiana Purchase. It ran alternately north and west 
from the mouth of the Sabine River to the point where the 
forty-second parallel of latitude meets the Pacific coast (see 
map, p. 319). The ratification of the treaty by the Senate 
was immediate and unanimous, but the Spanish Cortes with- 
held its consent for over a year and a half, for fear it would 
encourage the United States to recognize the rebel governments 
of Central and South America. It was not until July, 182 1, 
that the province of Florida was turned over to the United 



304 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



States and erected into a territory. Andrew Jackson, whose 
conduct in the Seminole War had received full vindication at 
the hands of Congress, in spite of the opposition of Henry Clay, 
and whose name was already being associated with the White 
House in the mouths of the men beyond the mountains^ was 
made the first governor of the territory. 

Two points bearing on the Louisiana Purchase deserve notice 
in the important treaty of 1819. By allowing West Florida to 
be included in the cession by Spain we virtually abandoned the 
claims put forward and acted upon by Jefferson, Madison, and 
Monroe since 1804 that we had purchased that region from 
Napoleon in 1803. And by accepting the Sabine as the south- 
western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase we relinquished, 
not without regret on the part of members of the cabinet and 
protests on the part of Western members of Congress, the far 
better claim which we had to Texas under the terms of the 
treaty of 1803 (see page 220). The ^^surrender of Texas," 
however, in spite of Clay's and Benton's fervid oratory, was not 
allowed to trouble the national rejoicing over the acquisition of 
the whole of Florida by clear title from the Iberville to the 
Atlantic.^ That acquisition was a great step in the expansion 
of our republic. It removed the dangers which for years had 
beset the westward march of our cotton-planters, and opened 
an uninterrupted communication from the rivers of that region 
to the Gulf. It made the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico an 
American lake. Henceforth the ships which left the mouth of 

^Clay's objections to the treaty were rightly interpreted as a rather factious 
opposition to the administration which had honored Adams instead of himself 
with the office of Secretary of State; and Benton's impassioned plea for the 
possession of the sparsely populated region beyond the Sabine was still looked 
on as the dreaming of a visionary. Even Jackson, according to the testimony of 
John Quincy Adams's ''Diary" (February 2, 1819), advised Monroe in a con- 
versation that the American people would be well content to let Texas go in lieu 
of the acquisition of Florida. Besides, the debates over the admission of Missouri 
as a slave state were beginning to convulse Congress and the country just at the 
moment when the Spanish treaty was concluded. Monroe may well have wished 
to avoid the charge of favoring the interests of the slaveholder by adding to our 
national domain another vast region which was certain in time to be made into 
one or more slave states. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



30s 



the Mississippi would have no fear from pirate crews issuing 
from their lair at the very delta, and might coast along the 
shore saluting the Stars and Stripes over the fortresses which 
had harbored thieves and marauders under the flag of Spain. 

The impetus of expansion extended even to the far North- 
west; through that ^'empire of mountains and prairies where 
the men of the Stone Age watched with alarm the first crawling 
waves of the tide of civilization that was to sweep them away." 
American traders and explorers, following in the footsteps of 
Lewis and Clark, began to contest with the British and Spanish 
agents the monopoly of the trappers' and hunters' rendezvous. 
After the unsuccessful attempt of the Missouri Fur Company 
to maintain a post in Oregon in 1810, John Jacob Astor estab- 
lished the emporium of the Pacific Fur Company at Astoria, at 
the mouth of the Columbia River. He was obliged to surrender 
it to the British during the War of 181 2, but recovered it a 
few years later by the restitution clause of the Treaty of 
Ghent. The British, in spite of Captain Gray's discovery of the 
Columbia River, and Lewis and Clark's expedition to its mouth, 
had asserted a claim to all the Pacific coast between Rus- 
sian Alaska on the north and Spanish California on the south. 
But now they consented tardily to recognize our interest 
in Oregon, the name by which the huge region lying west 
of the Rockies between the northern and southern limits 
just described was known. By a treaty negotiated at London 
in 1818,^ the boundary of Canada and the United States west 
of the Lake of the Woods was fixed at the forty-ninth parallel 
of latitude as far west as the Stony Mountains" (see map, 
p. 319) ; while the Oregon region beyond was to be held for a 
period of ten years by joint occupation, ^^free and open to the 

^The same treaty regulated the vexed question of the American fishing-rights 
off the Canadian coast, which had been granted by the treaty of 1783 but which 
the British contended had been abrogated by the War of 1812. Adams had 
labored in vain at Ghent to secure the protection of the New England fisher- 
men, whose exports in 1814 reached the enormous sum of $12,000,000. The new 
treaty of 1818 restored to the United States the right to catch, dry, and cure 
fish on certain extensive coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland and to use all 
the Canadian ports in case of distress or need of food. 



3o6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



vessels, citizens, and subjects of the two powers." This joint 
occupation continued until 1846, when the dividing line of 49° 
was extended to Puget Sound. 

In addition to the acts of Congress and the treaty negotiations 
described in this section, several important decisions of the 
Supreme Court came to reenforce the sentiment of nationalism 
in these years. Down to the Treaty of Ghent our national 
judiciary had shown but little sign of the great prestige which 
it was destined to enjoy on our history. Only three important 
cases had come before it in the years 1800-18 15. Membership 
in what we now regard as the most august body in our consti- 
tutional system was not very ardently sought for or highly 
prized. John Jay regarded it as a promotion to be transferred 
from the Supreme Court to the governorship of New York. 
Edward Rutledge preferred an appointment to the bench of 
South Carolina. But beginning with the year 181 6, a series 
of decisions written by Chief Justice Marshall and his able 
young associate Justice Story raised the court to a high emi- 
nence as the guardian of the Constitution of the United States. 

In the case of Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee the paramount 
authority of the United States over the highest tribunal of a 
state was maintained. The twenty-fifth section of the Judiciary 
Act of 1789 provided that appeals might be taken from the 
state courts to the Supreme Court in cases involving the inter- 
pretation of the Constitution. When the Virginia Court of Ap- 
peals, in 18 1 6, defying the act, refused to allow the case to 
go beyond its jurisdiction, the Supreme Court ruled that the 
act was constitutional and that the laws of the states were 
subject to the appellate power of the United States tribunal 
whenever the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the nation were 
concerned (i Wheat. ^ 304 ff.). Three years later, in the case 
of Dartmouth College vs. Woodward (4 Wheat. 518 ff.) the 
court nullified a law of the legislature of New Hampshire alter- 

^The United States Reports, or cases decided by the Supreme Court, are 
cited down to 1875 under the name of the reporter of the court (as Wheaton, 
Cranch, Howard, Wallace, etc.) . A.fter that date they are cited by volume and 
page simply (as 105 U. S. 654) , 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



307 



ing the charter of the college against the will of the trustees. The 
principle involved here was the inviolabiHty of contracts (Art. I, 
sect. 10 J par. i), the court holding that the charter of the 
college was a contract between the state and the trustees. The 
majority of the court was won to this decision by the impas- 
sioned plea of Daniel Webster in behalf of the injured dignity 
of his Alma Mater. Since the state legislatures were the source 
of innumerable charters to corporations of every kind, whose 
general regulation was under the police power of the state, 
this decision seemed to subject the various industrial, financial, 
educational, and public-service coporations of the country to 
the authority of the national judiciary. The sweeping effect 
of the decision was later modified by the insertion in the 
charters themselves of clauses giving the states the right to 
control corporations by legislation for the safeguarding of their 
moral and material interests. 

Most important of all the decisions of the court in those 
years was that handed down in the case of McCulloch vs. Mary- 
land in 1 819 (4 Wheat. 316 ff.). The National Bank was 
unpopular in many quarters. The old Democratic prejudice 
against the Bank as a privileged corporation and an engine 
of plutocracy was still strong, especially in the Western states. 
Furthermore, the Bank had been carelessly managed during 
the first two years of Madison's presidency, and its disordered 
condition was made responsible in the minds of many for the 
financial panic which overtook the country in 1819, although 
the panic was really due to a too rapid extension of enterprise 
and credit in the enthusiastic years which followed the War of 
1 81 2. When the branches of the United States Bank began to 
demand specie for the notes of the state banks which they held, 
the legislatures of various states (North Carolina, Ohio, Ken- 
tucky, Tennessee) started a war against the National Bank by 
taxing the issues of its branches within their borders. In Ohio 
an officer of the state actually drove up to the door of the United 
States branch bank at Chillicothe, entered the vaults, and seized 
the amount of money necessary to cover the tax. In Maryland 
the cashier of the United States branch bank at Baltimore, 



308 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



James W. McCulloch, refused to pay the tax on its notes levied 
by the legislature and carried his case against the state to the 
Supreme Court. The court unanimously agreed in the decision 
written by Chief Justice Marshall, which affirmed the right of 
Congress to incorporate a bank under the ^4mplied" power 
of adopting ^'necessary and proper" means to carry out a 
legitimate end (Art. I, sect. 8, pars, i, 2, 5, 12, 13, 18) and to 
establish in the states branches which should be immune from 
taxation except for the regular property tax on their buildings 
and land. ^^The power to tax," said Marshall, "is the power to 
destroy." If the states could levy a small tax on the Bank 
issues, they could also levy a large one and so drive the Bank 
out of business. 

These famous decisions, maintaining the competence of the 
national court to interpret the extent of the powers of the 
national government, were alarming to the old-school Repub- 
licans, who insisted on the strict limitation of Congress to the 
powers explicitly granted to it by the Constitution. Jefferson, 
who, since his retirement from the presidency, had tended to 
revert to his earlier championship of states' rights and distrust 
of the "general government," led the attack on these "usurp- 
ing" doctrines of his political enemy John Marshall. "The 
great object of my fear," he wrote to Thomas Rich in the year 
1820, "is the federal judiciary. That body, gaining ground 
step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulphing insidiously 
the special [state] governments into the jaws of that which 
feeds them." But the process of centralization, so obvious in 
the acts of Congress and the conduct of the executive, could 
not be stopped at the portals of the Supreme Court chamber. 
It was all a part of the process of expansion and nationalism 
traced in this section. It was the expression of the spirit of the 
new nation. 

There were numerous other signs in our political and eco- 
nomic life; and even in our literary and religious life, that bore 
witness to the new spirit : the remodeling of state constitutions 
along more democratic lines, the reduction in the price of pub- 
lic lands, the completion of the first section of the national 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



309 



Cumberland Road, the breaking down of the political and so- 
cial power of the old Calvinistic orthodoxy, the beginnings of 
a distinctly American school of literature, the rise of a group 
of nationally minded statesmen and orators like Webster, Ben- 
ton, Clay, Calhoun, and Everett. On April 13, 1818 (Jefferson's 
birthday!) our new national flag, with its thirteen alternate 
stripes of white and red and its twenty white stars in an azure 
field, was raised over the Capitol.^ It was a happy symbol of 
the new America. 



The Missouri Compromise and the Monroe Doctrine 

The same wave of westward migration which filled the land 
between the A^lleghenies and the Mississippi with a solid block 
of states in the four years succeeding the Treaty of Ghent did 
not stop at the banks of the great river. Timothy Flint, a 
trading preacher from New England, tells in his delightful 
"Recollections" how he stood on the heights of St. Charles on 
the lower Missouri in 181 8 and watched the immigrants cross 
the ferry of the Mississippi with their "4 and 6 horse waggons," 
their cattle "with a hundred bells," their expectant families 
and excited negroes — headed for the land of boundless promise. 
The territory of Missouri had been organized when Louisiana 
was admitted to the Union in 181 2. Its population of some 
20,000, scattered among a score of river settlements, was a 
medley of French hunters and trappers, shrewd Yankee ped- 
dlers, and solid German farmers dwelling in solid stone houses. 
When the peace of Ghent removed the Indian danger from the 
frontier, the territory began to fill up rapidly. Before the close 
of the decade the population of 20,000 had grown to 66,500, 
including about 10,000 slaves brought by the farmers of Ken- 

iBy act of April 4, 1818, the flag designed (as generally believed, by Betsy Ross) 
in 1777, and slightly modiiied in 1794, was altered to fit our growth. The act 
provided that a new star be added to the blue field on the Fourth of July suc- 
ceeding the admission of each new state to the Union. At first the cluster of white 
stars was arranged in the form of a large star, but later the stars were arranged 
in horizontal lines. 



310 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



tucky and Tennessee. Over 50 steamboats were running on the 
Mississippi and doing a business of $2,500,000 a year. The 
settlements had spread 60 miles and more up the Missouri val- 
ley to Boone's Lick, whose name celebrated the pioneer of 
trans-Allegheny migration. The climate was wholesome as con- 
trasted with the malarial regions to the south. All the cereals 
grew in abundance^ the corn yielding 90 bushels to the acre. 
The southern part of the territory was suitable for cotton 
culture. Deposits of lead and salt were worked with profit. 

In March, 181 8, the enterprising people of the Missouri 
territory presented to Congress through their delegate, John 
Scott, a petition praying for admission to the Union as a state. 
The matter went over to the next session of Congress, where a 
similar petition was read on December 18, 181 8. The following 
February the House began the debate on the petition, and 
James Tallmadge of New York precipitated the famous Mis- 
souri controversy by offering an amendment ^Hhat the further 
introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, 
except for the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall 
have been duly convicted, and that all children born within the 
said state after the admission thereof into the Union shall be 
free, but may be held to service until the age of twenty-five 
years." The House, after an interesting and pretty wide de- 
bate," adopted the Tallmadge amendment by a vote of 87 to 76, 
but the Senate rejected it. The House refused to recede from 
its position, and the Fifteenth Congress expired, March 3, 18 19, 
with the two Houses in deadlock on the question of slavery in 
the proposed new state of Missouri, but with little surmise that 
they had exchanged the first shots in a conflict which was to 
plunge the country into civil war. 

Negro slavery had been introduced into the colony of James- 
town in 1 61 9. The few thousand slaves brought over in the 
seventeenth century to work in the tobacco and rice fields of 
Virginia and the Carolinas, or to serve as coachmen and butlers 
in the families of the rich merchants of the North, seem to have 
been no cause of offense except to the little group of Quakers 
or to a sensitive philanthropist here and there. But the eight- 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



eenth century saw a great change in the attitude of the colo- 
nists toward slavery. A clause in the Treaty of Utrecht (the 
^^Asiento") gave to England the monopoly of the slave trade 
from the shores of Africa to the Spanish colonies of the New 
World (1713). There was an unlimited market on the Guinea 
coast for the rum distilled in New England, and there was an 
unlimited supply of sugar and molasses in the West Indies for 
the manufacture of more rum. The unoffending African served 
as the medium of exchange in the profitable transaction. Sold 
by their captor chiefs for rum, they were packed into the sti- 
fling holds of wooden vessels and brought through the equatorial 
seas to the West Indies, with all the horrors of the ^'middle 
passage." Rich merchants, high nobles, and even members of 
the royal family were interested in this nefarious traffic. The 
stimulus of greed, added to the natural development of our 
plantations, forced the rate of slave importation higher and 
higher. Several times during the eighteenth century the legis- 
latures of the Southern colonies, notably of Virginia, under the 
double impetus of humanitarian sentiment and concern for 
the increasing growth of an unassimilable element in their 
population, passed laws restricting the importation of African 
negroes, but the crown of England vetoed these laws. "We can- 
not allow the colonies," said Lord Dartmouth in 1774, "to 
check or discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the 
nation." On the eve of the American Revolution there were 
more than half a million slaves in the colonies ; ^ and how seri- 
ously the colonies then regarded the traffic is shown by the 
resolution of the first Continental Congress in October, 1774, 
to the effect that no more slaves should be imported after 
December, and that whoever broke this resolution should be 
"universally condemned as an enemy of American liberty." 
It is well known, too, that Thomas Jefferson, in the original 
draft of the Declaration of Independence, included among the 
grievances against King George a scathing indictment of his 

^Our first census, of 1790, gives the number of slaves as 697,897, of whom 
40,370 were north of Mason and Dixon's line. Of the 657,527 in the South the 
states of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas held 604,129. 



312 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



encouragement of ^^this execrable commerce." Jefferson sup- 
pressed the clause, however, out of deference to the feelings of 
the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia. The economic 
advantages of slavery in the lower South already outweighed 
humanitarian considerations, leaving the more noble-minded 
masters in a state of reluctant acquiescence.^ 

Slavery was warmly debated in the Constitutional Conven- 
tion of 1787, and although the words slaves" and slavery" 
were not mentioned in the Constitution, the institution was 
recognized and treated with considerable indulgence. Three 
fifths of the slaves were added to the white population to make 
the federal apportionment for representation, presidential elec- 
tors, and direct taxes. Congress was forbidden to interfere 
with the importation of slaves for a period of twenty years 
after the adoption of the Constitution. The return to their 
masters of fugitive slaves who had escaped into the free states 
was guaranteed. In accordance with the last-mentioned clause 
a Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress in 1793. This 
recognition of slavery by the Constitution furnished the 
Southerners of a later day with a good argument in favor of 
slavery as a national institution ; but the antislavery advocates, 
like Chase, Seward, and Lincoln, went back to the resolution of 
1774 and to the principles of the Declaration of Independence 
to prove that our Union was formed by patriots who believed 
that ^^all men are created equal" and endowed with liberty as 
an ^^unalienable right." 

Most important of all the questions concerning slavery was 
that of its extension to the great dominion beyond the Al- 
leghenies, ceded to us by England in the treaty of 1783. The 
very next year Thomas Jefferson submitted to Congress an or- 
dinance for the government of this territory, forever forbidding 

^Patrick Henry of Virginia wrote to a Quaker friend in 1773 : "Every think- 
ing honest man rejects it [slavery] in speculation, but how few in practice. . . . 
Would any one believe that I am master of slaves of my own purchase? I am 
drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them. I will not, I 
cannot, justify it. However culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to 
virtue as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts, and lament my 
want of conformity to them." 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



313 



slavery within its borders. The antislavery clause of Jefferson's 
ordinance was lost by the vote of a single state. Three years 
later Congress passed the famous Northwest Ordinance (con- 
firmed by an act of the first Congress under the Constitution), 
which excluded slavery from all our territory north of the 
Ohio River. The states formed out of this territory (Ohio in 
1803, Indiana in 1816, Illinois in 1818, Michigan in 1837, and 
Wisconsin in 1848) all came into the Union free; but south of 
the Ohio the states formed from lands ceded by Virginia, the 
CaroHnas, and Georgia (Kentucky in 1792, Tennessee in 1796, 
Mississippi in 181 7, and Alabama in 18 19) were naturally slave- 
holding. Thus the Ohio River formed the continuation of 
Mason and Dixon's line as the boundary between slavery 
and freedom. 

For several reasons the application of Missouri for state- 
hood in 1 81 8 marked a critical moment in our history. In the 
first place, the area of the proposed state lay wholly west of 
the Mississippi, land never owned nor claimed by any of the 
original states but purchased from Napoleon by the national 
government. Part of this area was above and part below the 
mouth of the Ohio, and it had received immigrants from both 
the free and the slave states. Its admission would form a prece- 
dent for the rest of the immense Louisiana Purchase territory.^ 
Furthermore, the free and slave states were exactly balanced 
(eleven each), which meant equal weight in the Senate. Since 
the North was increasingly predominant in the House, the 
Senate had to preserve this parity in order to protect its inter- 
ests.^ Again, the economic advantage of slavery to the South 
appeared immensely greater in 1820 than at the time of the 

^To be sure, the extreme southern part of the territory had been admitted as 
the state of Louisiana in 1812, with its existing institution of slavery. But the 
case of Missouri was different in that it was a territory built up chiefly by 
emigration from the United States. 

2 The population of the sections of the country north and south of Mason and 
Dixon's line was nearly equal by the first census, of 1790 (1,968,455 to 1,961,327). 
But by 1820 the North had 5,132,372, while the South, counting three fifths of 
the slaves, had only 3,312,244, The representation iri the House iii 1820 was 104 
from the free states and 79 from the slave states. 



314 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



debates on the Constitution. The results of the invention of 
the cotton gin by EH Whitney in 1793, which multipHed over 
three hundredfold the productive power of the slave in cleaning 
the seed from the cotton fiber, were fully manifest now. In 
1 79 1, when Hamilton made his famous report on manufactures, 
the South exported cotton for the first time — a meager 20,000 
pounds. The crop grew to 20,000,000 pounds a decade later, 
and by 1820 it reached 160,000,000 pounds.^ Such figures show 
that the destiny of the South was fixed in the production of the 
staple crop of cotton, to the exclusion of manufactures and 
diversified farming. They show also what a constant demand 
there was for new lands and new hands for the cotton culture. 
The lands were found in abundance in the new states of the 
West, but neither the natural increase among the slaves nor the 
importation of large numbers of negroes bred in the border 
states sufficed for the labor of the cotton fields. Some thousands 
of slaves were smuggled into the Southern ports from Africa 
each year, in spite of the prohibition of the act of Congress of 
1807, and no jury in the South could be found to convict the 
offending captains and owners of the vessels. 

The zeal to reserve the land west of the Mississippi for free 
states alone, to keep the balance against slavery in Congress 
and to rebuke the South for the open violation of the law for 
which all her representatives and senators had voted a dozen 
years before, gave a vehemence to the words of the Northern 
orators, like King, Taylor, and Tallmadge, which had not been 
heard in Congress since the days of Washington and Adams, 
when Federalist ^^Anglomen" and ^^Jacobinical" Republicans 
flayed one another ; while the Southern speakers, like Pinkney, 
Cobb, and McLean, met defiance with defiance and threat with 
threat. Jefferson said that the debates startled him like the 
sound of the fire bells at night. ^^The Missouri question is the 

iThe importance of the West in the growth of the cotton industry is seen by 
the following figures. In 1801 only 2 per cent of the crop was grown west of 
the Alleghenies; in 182 1 the states of Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Loui- 
siana produced 34.7 per cent of the 173,000,000 pounds, and in 1834 these same 
states produced 60.8 per cent of the 456,000,000 pounds grown. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 315 

most portentous one which has ever threatened the Union/' he 
wrote; ^4n the gloomiest hour of the Revolutionary War I 
never had any apprehensions equal to those which I feel from 
this source." 

The deadlock over the Tallmadge amendment, just as the Fif- 
teenth Congress came to a close^ threw the country into a state 
of great excitement. Resolutions for and against the restric- 
tion of slavery in Missouri were passed by various state legis- 
latures ; petitions came to Washington from societies^ churches, 
and clubs; the press was filled with controversial articles. It 
seemed as though all other national questions — the tariff, in- 
ternal improvements, the currency, and the panic — had been 
forgotten. When the new Congress met in December, 1819, the 
debates were resumed, the language growing more passionate 
and threatening as the issue became more clearly drawn — the 
extension or the limitation of slave soil. The North argued that 
the clause in the Constitution reading ^^New states may be 
admitted by Congress into the Union" conferred on Congress 
the power to determine on what conditions it would admit new 
states to the Union. Moreover, several states had already been 
admitted under various restrictions in regard to slaveholding, 
the taxation of lands, the navigation of rivers, and interference 
with civil or religious liberty. The South replied that such 
restrictions, except as they were expressly contained in the 
Constitution of the United States, were invalid, and that for 
Congress to impose terms of entrance on a state at will was to 
reduce such a state to a mere province of the central govern- 
ment. It was as an equal in a union of equal states that 
Missouri sought admission; she must be as free as South 
Carolina or Massachusetts to determine her domestic institu- 
tions. Otherwise, she came in, as William Pinkney of Mary- 
land said, "shorn of her beams, with the iron collar of servitude 
about her neck instead of the civic crown of republican freedom 
upon her brow." Congress might indeed refuse admission to 
Missouri as long as it wished, but when the state came in, it 
must be with her sovereign rights unimpaired. This was the 
crux of the controversy^ though other arguments were not lack- 



3i6 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



ing. When the South pointed to the third article of the 
Louisiana Purchase treaty of 1803, by which we promised that 
the inhabitants of the territory should be incorporated into the 
United States as soon as possible, and in the meantime be ^^pro- 
tected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the 
religion which they profess," Rufus King replied that inter- 
national law did not recognize slaves as ^'property" nor include 
them as such in treaty stipulations. When Henry Clay argued 
that admitting slavery into Missouri would ^^not add to the slave 
population a single soul," but would dilute" the evil by spread- 
ing it over a wider area and ^'alleviate the unhappy lot of those 
hemmed in within too narrow lines," the Northern speakers 
rebuked the sophistry which recommended the extermination of 
the poisonous weed by scattering its seeds broadcast. 

There seemed to be little hope of a peaceable settlement of 
the Missouri question. The South would not give up the consti- 
tutional right of a new state to enter the Union on an equal 
footing with the other states, and the North would not give 
up its determination to prevent the spread of slavery beyond 
the Mississippi. One section was accused of concealing beneath 
its zeal for the doctrine of states' rights the sinister purpose of 
opening new territory to slavery ; the other section was accused 
of stirring up moral indignation against slavery as a mere polit- 
ical ruse for restoring the Federalists to power and keeping 
Southern interests in permanent subjection in both Houses of 
Congress. The patient, imperturbable Monroe was confident 
that a compromise could be found, but few of our leading 
statesmen were so optimistic. John Quincy Adams confided 
his apprehension of civil strife to his Diary," with the comment 
that if the battle must come it had better come on this issue. 
Henry Clay feared that in five years the Union would be split, 
and declared that the words civil war" and "disunion" were 
uttered "almost without an emotion." Cobb of Georgia warned 
Tallmadge that he had "kindled a fire . . . which only seas 
of blood could extinguish." However, a way of compromise 
was found. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



The province of Maine, which had been a part of Massa- 
chusetts since its purchase from the heirs of Gorges in 1677, 
had long been eager to be formed into a separate state. It 
finally wdn the consent of the legislature of ^Massachusetts, and 
at the opening of Congress in December, 181 9, applied, with a 
free-state constitution already formed^ for admission to the 
Union. The House promptly passed the bill admitting INIaine. 
The Senate committee, however, added to the INIaine bill a 
provision for the admission of Missouri without any restriction 
in regard to slavery. After an exciting debate of a month in 
the Senate, Thomas of Illinois proposed as an amendment to 
the part of the bill touching Missouri that slavery be forever 
excluded from all the Louisiana Purchase territory north of 
latitude 36° 30' (the southern boundary of Missouri), except in 
the proposed state of Missouri itself. Fourteen of the twenty- 
two senators from the slave states voted for the Thomas 
amendment. The House at first rejected the Thomas amend- 
ment, repassing the bill for the admission of Missouri with the 
Tallmadge amendment by a vote of 91 to 82 ; but after a con- 
ference with the Senate enough Northern votes were won to 
carry the Thomas clause. The final vote in the House on the 
Compromise was 90 to 87. The fourteen Congressmen from 
the free states who joined the unanimous delegation of South- 
erners in voting for the Missouri Compromise were actuated by 
honorable motives,^ but the caustic John Randolph contemptu- 
ously dubbed them ^Mough-faces" — a name thereafter applied 
to Northern men who supported the proslavery measures of 
the South. On March 3, 1820, President Monroe signed the 
bill admitting Maine as a free state, and three days later the 

^They believed that compromise was necessary to save the Union, and that 
the South had shown great generosity in accepting the Thomas amendment, 
which closed nine tenths of the Louisiana Purchase territory to slavery. Further- 
more, the consent of Massachusetts to the separation of Maine was conditioned 
on the admission of Maine to the Union before March 4, 1820. Perhaps some of 
the Northern Republicans were induced to vote for the Compromise, by the 
fear that the Federalists, led by Rufus King, would get back into power on the 
issue of slavery restriction. 



31 8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



bill authorizing Missouri to frame a constitution without any 
restriction of slavery.^ 

The full importance of the Missouri Compromise appears 
only in the light of the history of the generation following. For 
the moment it seemed to have settled the controversy over 
slavery and thwarted the formation of new political parties 
on that issue.^ Regarded as a cowardly surrender of principles 
by zealots on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line, like 
Tallmadge and Randolph^ the Compromise stimulated aboli- 
tionist sentiment in the North and fortified the doctrine of 
states' rights in the South. It revived the agitation over the 
ethics of slaveholding, which had been rather in abeyance since 
the debates of the Constitutional Convention and thoroughly 
quieted with the passage of the law forbidding the slave trade. 
It revealed with startling clearness to the North, where slavery 
was rapidly nearing extinction, how firmly the economic conse- 
quences of the invention of the cotton gin (enormously acceler- 
ated production, clamor for new lands, trebling of the price 
of sound negroes) had fixed the institution on the South. It 
connected the question of the restriction or extension of slavery 
with westward expansion. By sanctioning the line of 36° 30' be- 
tween slavery and freedom in our Western territory, it empha- 

1 The actual admission of Missouri was delayed for more than a year because 
the House objected to clauses in the proposed constitution which discriminated 
against free negroes. Henry Clay engineered the final compromise, by which 
Missouri was admitted (August 10, 1821) on agreeing that no clause of her con- 
stitution should ever "be construed to authorize the passage of any laws ... by 
which any citizen of either of the states of the Union shall be excluded from the 
enjoyment of any of the privileges and immunities to which said citizen is en- 
titled under the Constitution of the United States." 

2 John Quincy Adams writes in his "Diary" (Vol. VI, p. 529): "The discus- 
sion of the Missouri question . . . revealed the basis for a new organization of 
parties. Here was a new party ready formed . . . threatening in its immediate 
effect that southern domination which had swayed the Union for the last 20 
years." All through the long period of electioneering for the presidential cam- 
paign of 1824 there were fears among the followers of Clay north of the Ohio 
that the Missouri question would be revived and that under the slogan "No 
slavery" the Northwest would be stampeded to Adams. 




The Trans-Mississippi Country and the Missouri Compromise 



320 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



sized the sectional rivalry and helped to detach the new states 
of the Northwest (Indiana and Illinois) from their sympathy 
with the agrarian communities of the South and join them to 
the manufacturing and commercial communities of the East. 
The free-soil motive became for the first time an integrat- 
ing principle from Boston Harbor to the banks of the upper 
Mississippi. 

Contemporary statesmen maintained that the Missouri Com- 
promise saved the Union, but it is not difficult for us to see the 
germs of disunion in the measure. It deliberately divided the 
national house against itself. The control of the territories by 
Congress was not the point at issue. All the members of 
Monroe's cabinet, including Calhoun, agreed to that doctrine. 
Every Southerner in the House voted for it in the Missouri bill. 
The controverted question was whether Congress could put 
restrictions on a new state about to enter the Union. The 
Tallmadge amendment embodied that doctrine. It failed to 
pass the Senate, by a vote of 1 6 to 22, four Northern men voting 
against it. Had these men from Illinois^ Massachusetts, and 
Pennsylvania supported the amendment, it would have passed 
the Senate and in all probability have been signed by the 
President. Congress then, with its increasing free-soil repre- 
sentation, could have made the prohibition of slavery the con- 
dition for the admission of future states until there were enough 
free states in the Union to secure the passage of an amendment 
to the Constitution abolishing slavery. This program, to be 
sure, might have met with opposition and been thwarted in 
ways which we cannot see^ but its initial failure in the case of 
Missouri wrecked whatever chance there was for the peaceable 
abolition of slavery. This is the immense significance of the 
Missouri Compromise. ''It contributed towards making the war 
of 1 861 an historic necessity.'' 

It seems at first sight strange that the very year which wit- 
nessed the final stormy debates on the Missouri Compromise 
should have marked also the culmination of the ''era of good 
feelings," in the virtually unanimous reelection of James Monroe 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



321 



to the presidency/ The logical outcome of the Missouri strug- 
gle would have been the formation of a proslavery states'-rights 
party in the South to oppose the free-soil trend of the North. 
Yet such a party was some years in forming. Attachment to the 
Union was strong on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. 
The generous enthusiasm with which statesmen of both sections 
had given themselves to plans for national aggrandizement 
after the War of 181 2 was still working powerfully. The Vir- 
ginian president continued to recommend protection for manu- 
factures in his messages of 182 1, 1822, and 1823, and he was 
supported not only by Henry Clay of Kentucky but also by 
Senator Hayne of South Carolina. Although the comprehensive 
bill for the upkeep of the national Cumberland Road was vetoed 
by Monroe in the spring of 1822, the opposition proceeded 
rather from scruples as to the powers of Congress under the 
Constitution to foster internal improvements" than from any 
realization that the interests of the South were opposed to the 
encouragement of a surplus in the Treasury to be expended on 
the development of a free Northwest." Finally^ the years im- 
mediately following the Missouri controversy were occupied 
with the discussion of important foreign questions, whose effect 
is always to sink domestic discord in the larger issue of national 
safety and prestige. 

The turbulent events of the French Revolution and the rise 
and fall of Napoleon's dominion in Europe, which had exercised 

^No candidate ran against Monroe, v/ho received all but one of the electoral 
votes. That one was cast for John Quincy Adams by an elector from New 
Hampshire whose dissatisfaction with Monroe's administration outweighed the 
sentimental consideration of a unanimous vote. 

2 Monroe in his long veto message argued the constitutional point with great 
earnestness, consistently maintaining the position that an amendment to the Con- 
stitution would remove his scruples. That the Westerners believed their interests 
thwarted by a mistaken political philosophy and not by any sectional opposition 
from the South is shown by the comments of the Western press. "There is a 
party of politicians at Washington," said an Ohio paper in July, 1823, ''whose 
consciences are so tender or whose minds are so contracted that no general system 
of internal improvements can be anticipated from the councils of the nation until 
there is a radical change in the Executive Department." 



322 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



so powerful an influence over the domestic and foreign policies 
of the new American republic for a quarter of a century, had 
their aftermath in diplomatic negotiations which culminated in 
the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. And from the close of Monroe's 
second term to the end of the nineteenth century no major 
American policies were dictated by the action of the European 
powers. Conservative reaction to repair the havoc which 
Napoleon had made among the thrones of Europe was inevitable 
after the overthrow of the Corsican adventurer. On its senti- 
mental side it took the form of the Holy Alliance, a league in 
which the rulers of Austria and Prussia joined the romantic 
Czar of Russia in an agreement to rule their peoples as pious 
despots, ^'in accord with the principles of the holy Christian 
religion." On its more practical side it took the form of a 
quadruple alliance between the above-mentioned powers and 
England (France being admitted a little later, when she had 
given due signs of repentance for her infatuation with Napo- 
leon), to watch over Europe and prevent the tares of democ- 
racy, which had been sowed by the French Revolution, from 
springing up and choking the pure wheat of authority. The 
program of the Quadruple Alliance was to be carried out in 
a series of European congresses meeting at frequent intervals 
to uphold the principle of legitimacy," which Henry Clay 
called ^^a soft word for despotism." So long as the Alliance 
confined its operations to Europe, chastising revolution in 
Piedmont or Naples, it was no concern of the United States ; 
but when the Congress of Verona (1822), in addition to the 
plan of crossing the Pyrenees to quell revolt in Spain, mooted 
the design of crossing the Atlantic to restore to King Ferdinand 
Spain's colonies which had set up as independent republics in 
the New World, the aspect of affairs was changed. Great Britain 
refused to be a party to the schemes of the Congress of Verona. 
She had developed a thriving trade with the South American 
republics, which the restoration of the authority of Spain would 
have ruined. Besides, there were rumors that Mexico was to 
be allotted to France and California to Russia in payment for 
their shares in the overseas enterprise. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



323 



Meanwhile there had been growing in the United States a 
sentiment in favor of recognizing the independence of the new 
Spanish-American repubhcs and even of forming a close alliance 
with them. The champion of this Pan-American policy was 
Henry Clay, who in impassioned speeches in the House urged 
the sympathy of our nation for eighteen millions of people 
struggling to burst their chains." ^'We look too much abroad," 
he said; ^4et us no longer watch the nod of any European 
politician, let us become real and true Americans and place 
ourselves at the head of the American system." So long as our 
negotiations with Spain over the Florida treaty were pending 
(seepage 303) we cautiously refrained from recognizing the new 
republics, although we showed our sympathy for them by open- 
ing our ports to them and maintaining "agents" in Caracas, 
Buenos Aires, and other centers of the revolt. The Florida 
treaty was finally ratified by the Spanish Cortes in 182 1, and 
in the spring of the next year Monroe signified to Congress 
his readiness to recognize the republics, asking for the appro- 
priations necessary to maintain diplomatic establishments in 
them. The House responded with but a single dissenting vote. 
On June 17, 1822, a minister from Colombia was formally re- 
ceived at Washington, and within the next few months United 
States ministers were sent to the most important of the Spanish- 
American republics. Colombia and Chile, in a treaty of July, 
1822, suggested "the construction of a continental system for 
America" as a makeweight to the Quadruple Alliance in Europe.^ 

Another important event occurred about the same time to 
warn the American government of the danger of the encroach- 
ment of European powers on the Western Hemisphere. The 
Czar of Russia issued an ukase (decree) in the early autumn 
of 182 1, claiming the north Pacific coast as far south as the 

1 Perhaps they were taking a leaf from the book of Henry Clay, who had made 
a speech in the summer of 182 1 exposing the sinister designs of the Holy Alliance 
and advocating the formation of a counterbalancing alliance in the two Ameri- 
cas, with liberty and democracy for its watchwords in the place of legitimacy 
and autocracy. Still earlier (1820) Clay had announced the grandiose plan of es- 
tablishing "a human-freedom league in America, including all the nations from 
Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn," 



324 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



fiftieth parallel and warning the vessels of all other nations not 
to approach within one hundred miles of that coast. Secretary- 
Adams met the decree with a powerful protest. He told the 
Russian minister, Baron Tuyl, that we should contest the 
right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this conti- 
nent, and should assume distinctly the principle that the Amer- 
ican continents are no longer subjects for any new European 
colonial establishments." When, therefore, the British foreign 
minister, George Canning, suggested to Richard Rush, our 
minister at the court of St. James, the desirability of united 
action on the part of the two countries in preventing the Alliance 
from extending its activities to the American continents, he 
spoke to receptive ears.^ Rush referred the matter to Wash- 
ington, and Monroe, as was his custom, conferred with the 
ex-presidents Jefferson and ]\Iadison. Both of them were in 
favor of accepting Canning's proposal. Jefferson's reply, dated 
October 24, 1823, is especially noteworthy as containing the 
gist of the doctrine announced six weeks later by the Presi- 
dent: ^^The question presented by the letters you have sent 
me is the most momentous which has been presented to my 
contemplation since that of independence. That made us a 
nation, this sets our compass and points the course which we 
are to steer through the ocean of time opening upon us. . . . 
Our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle 
ourselves in the broils of Europe. Our second never to suffer 
Europe to meddle in cis-Atlantic affairs. America, north and 
south, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe and 
peculiarly her own. She should therefore have a system of her 
own apart from those of Europe." 

lAs a matter of fact, the first suggestion of common action between the 
United States and Great Britain for the protection of the Latin-American re- 
pubUcs had come from this side of the water. John Quincy Adams records iri 
his "Diar}^," under the date of July 25, 1818, "Two days ago Monroe had very 
abruptly asked me to see Mr. Bagot [the British minister at Washington] and 
propose through him to the British government an immediate cooperation 
between the United States and Great Britain to promote the independence of 
South America."' But on the English side Lord Castlereagh was not willing, and 
on our side the Florida negotiations stood in the way. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



325 



John Quincy Adams was no less eager than Jefferson or 
Madison to thwart the designs of the AlHance in the Western 
Hemisphere, but he beHeved that we should ^^make it an Amer- 
ican cause alone/' especially as we were the only nation that had 
recognized the independence of the South American republics. 
^'It would be more candid as well as more dignified/' he said in 
cabinet meeting, ^Ho avow our principles explicitly to Russia 
and France than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of a 
British man-of-war." The view of the Secretary of State pre- 
vailed with Monroe over the advice of his two older councilors, 
and the annual message which the President sent to Congress 
on December 2, 1823, contained that announcement of our 
policy in regard to the relations of European powers to the 
Western Hemisphere which has ever since been known as the 
Monroe Doctrine. 

There are three main principles set down in the Monroe 
Doctrine — two specific and one general. The first, aimed es- 
pecially at Russia's threat of encroachment on the Pacific coast, 
declared that ^^the American continents, by the free and inde- 
pendent condition which they have assumed and maintained, 
are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colo- 
nisation by any European powers." The second was a warning 
to the Quadruple Alliance not to interfere to reduce the new 
Spanish-American republics to their old allegiance, nor to at- 
tempt to establish on this continent the autocratic principles of 
divine-right monarchy: "We owe it therefore to candor, and to 
the amicable relations existing between the United States and 
those powers, to declare that we should consider any attempt on 
their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemi- 
sphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing 
colonies of any European power we have not interfered and shall 
not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their 
independence, and maintained it, and whose independence we 
have, on great considerations and on just principles, acknowl- 
edged, we could not view any interposition for the sake of 
oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their des- 
tiny by any European power^ in any other light than as the 



32 6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United 
States." The third principle was the general proposition of the 
^Hwo spheres" of influence — the United States disclaiming any 
desire to interfere with the internal affairs of Europe, and at the 
same time denying the right of Europe to interfere with affairs 
in America: "In the wars of the European powers in matters 
relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does 
it comport with our policy to do so. It is only when our rights 
are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or 
make preparations for our defence. . . . Our policy in regard 
to Europe is not to interfere with internal concerns of any of 
its powers, to consider the government de facto as the legitimate 
government for us, to cultivate friendly relations with it, . . . 
meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submit- 
ting to injuries from none. But in regard to these continents 
circumstances are eminently and conspicuously different. It is 
impossible that the allied powers should extend their political 
system to any portion of either continent without endangering 
our peace and happiness." 

This general principle, on which the specific warnings of the 
Monroe Doctrine were based, did not originate with Monroe or 
Adams or Canning. It is as old as our national government 
itself. It appears in Washington's Neutrality Proclamation of 
1793 and in his Farewell Address of 1796. It was constantly 
reiterated by his successors, especially by Jefferson. Canning 
told Rush in a conversation in 1823 that he had been reading 
Jefferson's letters as Secretary of State (1793) and that he 
found them "admirable," forming a "complete neutral code." 
As for the specific announcement of December, 1823, it has 
been claimed that Adams's name, or even Canning's, would be 
more appropriately linked with it than Monroe's. Canning 
virtually claimed the credit for safeguarding the independence 
of the new republics when he made his famous boast in Par- 
liament in 1826, "I called the New World into existence to 
redress the balance of the Old." But as we have seen, Monroe 
had sought to approach the British minister in Washington on 
the subject as early as i8i-8. Furthermore, Canning was not 



THE NEW NATIONALISjM 



327 



at all pleased with the form which the IVIonroe Doctrine actually 
took, and spoke sneeringly of ^^the President's influential mes- 
sage." He was a vain man, a Tory with little sympathy for 
republican institutions, and he maintained throughout his ten- 
ure of power the tone of urbane hostility to the United States 
which he had shown in the days of his negotiations with Jeffer- 
son's government on impressments and our maritime rights. 
He refused to acknowledge the independence of the Spanish- 
American republics and was interested only in getting us to 
support England in the preservation of the open door for their 
commerce. When he was assured by the French minister at 
London that there was really no danger of intervention to 
restore the rule of Spain on this side of the Atlantic, his ardor 
for a proclamation for the protection of the republics cooled. 
Adams, of course, contributed very largely to the promulgation 
of the Monroe Doctrine and probably furnished much of the 
actual text of the document. But Adams never suggested that 
the credit for the message belonged to him, and in his own 
presidency he referred to it as ^Hhe doctrine announced by 
my predecessor to the world." 

The Monroe Doctrine was resented and ridiculed in the press 
of Europe; but it was received ^Vith one general glow of 
enthusiasm in the United States," as Daniel W^ebster said, and 
it has ever since been the most popular slogan in American 
history.^ In 1895, when we were in the midst of a controversy 
with Great Britain over the boundary line between Venezuela 
and British Guiana, Secretary Olney asserted that the Monroe 
Doctrine was ^Hhe accepted public law of this country." But 
to call it ^^public law" was rather bold. It was nothing more 
than an announcement of policy in a presidential message. 
The European nations never accepted its validity as a tenet 
of international law, although they generally respected it in 
practice. Henry Clay introduced a joint resolution into Con- 
gress in 1824 sanctioning the doctrine, but the legislative de- 

^The immediate result was a treaty with Russia, concluded in 1824, by which 
that power agreed to hmit her claims to the southward on the Pacific coast by 
the parallel 54° 40' north latitude. 



328 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



partment of our government was content to let the matter rest 
as an executive pronouncement. Nor have our courts based 
their decisions upon the doctrine as ^'pubHc law." 

Captain Mahan declared that the Monroe Doctrine possesses 
^^the inherent principle of life, which adapts itself with the 
flexibility of a growing plant to the successive conditions it 
encounters." It is true that the doctrine has been invoked 
again and again as our warrant to dictate as to the ownership 
of ^^the existing European colonies" in the Western Hemi- 
sphere, to assert our authority in the settlement of controversies 
over boundaries or debts between European powers and the 
Spanish-American republics, and even to interfere in the in- 
ternal affairs of those republics themselves. The stretching of 
the Monroe Doctrine by ^interpretation" was begun as early as 
the summer of 1825, when Clay warned France that we should 
not allow Cuba or Porto Rico to be transferred from Spain 
to any other European power. But there is nothing in the 
language of the doctrine to warrant these later widenings of 
its scope. There is no word of an hegemony of the United 
States over the countries to the south or of our right to arbi- 
trate their disputes. There is no hint of a financial protector- 
ate, such as we have exercised in Santo Domingo, Haiti, and 
Nicaragua. All these powers have been derived from the doc- 
trine by ^implication." The purpose of the doctrine as it existed 
in Monroe's mind was fulfilled when the danger of Russian 
aggression on the Pacific coast and of European intervention 
in South America was over. It was purely defensive and pre- 
cautionary. It has been made aggressive and comprehensive. 
That part of the doctrine which announced our guardianship 
of the independence and inviolability of the Latin-American 
republics has tended more and more toward a pan-American 
union. That part which declared our policy of abstention from 
the ^Vars agitating Europe" was broken in spirit when we 
embarked on colonial adventures in the Far East and joined 
the powers in the preservation of the integrity of the Chinese 
Empire, and in letter when we sent American troops to the 
battlefields in Flanders and France in the great World War. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



329 



Sectional Rivalry 

As Monroe's highly successful administration drew to a close 
the country was at the flood tide of prosperity. The forty years 
which had elapsed since the close of the American Revolution 
had seen our population grow from less than 4,000,000 to over 
10,000,000, and our area more than doubled by the acquisitions 
from France and Spain. An agreement had been made with 
Great Britain in 1818 for the joint occupation of the Oregon 
territory beyond the Rockies. The new national defenses and 
naval enlargement projected after the War of 181 2 had pro- 
gressed satisfactorily. Our debt, which stood at $123,000,000 
at Monroe's inauguration, was reduced to $79,000,000 when he 
left office. The financial panic of 1819 was weathered, and the 
National Bank, surviving its brief period of mismanagement, 
was entering on a career of prosperity under its able president, 
Langdon Cheves. The American ship Savannah crossed the 
ocean under sail and steam in 18 19, though nearly twenty years 
passed before steam ^^packets" were plying regularly between 
New York and Liverpool. On our inland waters and along the 
coast from Boston to New Orleans steam navigation was in- 
creasing rapidly. The great Erie Canal, destined to open an 
American waterway from the Lakes to the Atlantic and to make 
New York the metropolis of the Western World, was begun 
the year Monroe entered office, being completed with fitting 
ceremonies the year he retired. 

The sectional bitterness caused by the War of 1812 seemed 
to have died away. Massachusetts returned to the Republican 
fold with the election of Governor Eustis in 1823, while the 
legislature of the state struck from its records the unpatriotic 
resolutions of a decade before to the effect that it was "un- 
becoming a moral and religious people" to rejoice over the 
naval victories of Hull, Bainbridge, and Decatur. Although 
the tone of the debates on the Missouri question had been omi- 
nous, all danger of civil strife seemed to be removed by the 
Compromise. The balance between the free and the slave states 
was preserved and the status of slavery "forever" fixed in the 



330 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



new Western territory by the 36° 30' line. Finally, in the 
Monroe Doctrine we had assumed the role of arbiter of impor- 
tant matters in the western continent and had spoken to Europe 
in a tone of firm consciousness of our place among the powers" 
of the world. Few presidents in our history have been able to 
look back upon their administration with more unalloyed satis- 
faction than the patient, sagacious, conciliatory James Monroe 
— an administration which the old Federalist John Adams pro- 
nounced ^Vithout a fault," and the Federalist Judge Marshall 
declared ^ Vas not darkened b}'' a single cloud." 

Nevertheless, the historical student, from the vantage ground 
of a wider perspective, sees already germinating in Monroe's 
second administration the seeds of a bitter sectional rivalry 
which was to make the administration of his successor a con- 
stant trial and to result in a new alignment of parties which was 
to last through a generation to the great crisis of the Civil War. 
Every feature of that revival of national spirit which we have 
studied in the present chapter — the restoration of the National 
Bank, the high tariff, the increase of our defenses on sea and 
land, the expenditure of national funds for internal improve- 
ments, the unlimited offer of public lands at cheap prices, the 
growing prestige and authority of the Supreme Court, and even 
the bold and popular policy announced in the Monroe Doc- 
trine — became a subject of violent controversy, in which the 
divergent interests of the various sections of our country 
clashed. 

The first test of the strength of the rival sections came in 
the presidential election of 1824, although the sectional charac- 
ter of the rivalry was not yet explicit or avowed. The dynasty 
of Virginia secretaries" came to an end with Monroe. But long 
before the expiration of his term of office different parts of the 
country were recommending their favorite sons" for the suc- 
cession. The legislature of South Carolina designated William 
Lowndes as early as 1821. The next year Tennessee put for- 
ward Andrew Jackson and Kentucky named Henry Clay. In 
January, 1823, a mixed convention of Republican members of 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



331 



tlie legislature and delegates of the towns of Massachusetts 
nominated John Quincy Adams. The time-honored method of 
selecting a candidate by a congressional caucus was falling into 
disrepute because of its undemocratic nature. Still, a caucus 
met in February, 1824, and named the Secretary of the Treas- 
ury, William H. Crawford, who had been manipulating the 
political wires and using his official patronage for some years to 
accomplish this desired result. But the fact that only 68 of the 
261 members of Congress attended the caucus was a sufficient 
indication of the measure of strength which this method of 
nomination would give to Crawford's candidacy. 

All of these aspirants for the presidency belonged to the Re- 
publican party — for there was no other party to belong to. 
Each of them, wishing to appear as a truly national figure with 
a program to win votes in all parts of the Union, minimized or 
disguised in ambiguous language the interests of the particular 
section which he represented. Besides, those interests, as we 
have already seen, were not sharply enough defined in 1824 
to unite compact political parties in their support. The tariff 
bill passed in the spring of that presidential year is an illus- 
tration. It was championed by Clay, praised by Adams, and 
accepted by Jackson — only Crawford refusing to commit him- 
self. The consistent policy of the support of high tariffs by the 
North and their antagonism by the South, which appears in all 
subsequent tariff legislation, was not developed in 1824. Such 
fight as there was over the bill was on the question of the 
distribution of the benefits of protection. Kentucky, Missouri, 
and Pennsylvania supported the measure for its duties on hemp, 
lead, and iron ; the industrial interests of the North, for its pro- 
tection to the cotton and woolen manufactures; while the 
mercantile interests of New England and New York made com- 
mon cause with the South in opposing a bill which increased 
the cost of materials for building ships, cultivating plantations, 
and clothing slaves. The narrow margin by which the bill was 
finally passed after a debate of two and a half months (105 to 
102 in the House, 25 to 22 in the Senate) gave Httle encour- 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



agement to Clay's optimistic theory that harmony could be 
preserved by a judicious distribution of sectional favor/ 

In the absence of any clearly defined pohtical issues, the 
campaign of 1824 took on an intensely personal aspect, the 
more so as all the aspirants for the presidency were together in 
Washington during the previous winter — Adams, Calhoun, and 
Crawford in Monroe's cabinet, Jackson in the Senate, and Clay 
in the House. Adams's voluminous Diary" reveals the extraor- 
dinary amount of electioneering that went on. The vote in 
November resulted in the choice of 99 electors for Jackson, 84 
for Adams, 41 for Crawford, and 37 for Clay. Calhoun, seeing 
the drift of his own state of South Carolina toward Jackson, 
had wisely accepted the advice of a Pennsylvania convention to 
run for the vice presidency. He received 182 of the 261 votes 
cast. As no candidate for the presidency had received a ma- 
jority, the names of the three highest on the list went to the 
House for a decision, the group of Representatives from each 
state casting a single vote. Henry Clay, though out of the race 
himself, obviously had it in his power to turn the scales in favor 
of either Adams or Jackson. His influence as Speaker of the 
House was great, and the Republicans of those states which 
had given him their electoral votes (Kentucky, Ohio, and 
Missouri) would naturally support the candidate whom he 
favored. The genial Speaker, therefore, was courted by each 
of the factions and assured by each of the great respect in 
which his talents were held by their respective candidates. Clay 
had not been friendly to Adams during the Monroe adminis- 
tration. He had himself coveted the high appointment which 
Adams received. The two men were, moreover, uncongenial in 
their tastes and habits. Yet they were brought together and had 
a long interview (the details of which Adams discreetly omits 
from his ''Diary") a few weeks before the balloting began 

i"It has appeared to me in the administration of the general government to 
be a just principle to inquire what interests belong to each section of our coun- 
try, and to promote those interests as far as practical, consistently with the Con- 
stitution, having always an eye to the welfare of the whole" (to Francis Brooke, 
August 28, 1823). 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



333 



in the House. Immediately after the interview Clay announced 
that he should support Adams. On the first ballot cast by the 
House Adams was elected by the votes of thirteen states. Jack- 
son carried seven and Crawford four. Two days later Adams 
offered Clay the first place in his cabinet. 

This series of events gave rise to the charge of a "corrupt 
bargain" between Adams and Clay to defeat the will of the 
people of the United States to seat Andrew Jackson in the presi- 
dential chair. A Republican from Pennsylvania, named Kremer, 
published a card in a Philadelphia paper^ alleging that Adams 
had offered Clay the post of Secretary of State in return for his 
votes in the House, and that Clay would have been willing to 
secure Jackson's election if the latter's agents had been ready 
to meet the bid. "None of Jackson's friends would descend to 
such mean barter and sale," declared Kremer. Clay indignantly 
repelled the charge in a public communication and demanded 
an investigation by the House, which Kremer sneaked out of. 
Nevertheless, when Clay received and accepted the appoint- 
ment, Jackson believed that the charge was true, and pilloried 
Clay as "the Judas of the West," who had made his unholy 
bargain for thirty pieces of silver. The Jackson forces every- 
where took up the cry. Impetuous John Randolph poured out 
his scorn for this alliance of "the Puritan and the Black-leg," 
and answered for his epithets by a duel with Clay, in which 
neither was hurt. 

Adams has been called "injudicious" by some historians for 
appointing Clay in defiance of the widespread suspicion of a 
"deal" between them. But both men are above any suspicion 
of dishonorable action. Clay had every good reason to give 
his support to Adams. On the questions of national policy 
which Clay had most at heart, like the protective tariff and 
internal improvements, Adams was far more sympathetic than 
either of the other two candidates. Crawford, besides his per- 
sonal unfitness for the office, due to a stroke of paralysis suf- 
fered in the autumn of 1823, was already committed to 
the thoroughgoing states'-rights view of the older men of the 
South. And Jackson was not only Clay's bitter rival for the 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



leadership of the West but was in Clay's opinion utterly unfit 
for the presidency, being a mere military chieftain" whose 
claim to political honors rested on the victory of New Orleans 
and the chastisement of Indians and half-breeds in Florida. 
If Clay also believed that his own political fortunes would be 
best served by alliance with a candidate who had carried New 
England and New York, he was entertaining a notion which 
it would be mere hypocrisy to condemn in our American 
politics. As for the upright Adams, there is no evidence that he 
consulted any other consideration than the public good in ap- 
pointing Clay, nor has it ever been a cause of reproach to 
our presidents, down to Woodrow Wilson, that they have given 
the first place in their cabinets to disappointed rivals or to men 
who have made their own election sure. 

John Quincy Adams, by his natural gifts, his training, his 
wide experience in public affairs,^ by the justness of his views 
and the spotless integrity of his character, was one of the best- 
qualified men ever elected to the presidency. But he was chosen 
at an evil moment for his own peace of soul. His entire admin- 
istration was vexed with factional quarrels and sectional jeal- 
ousies, while he himself tried to pursue a course of broad and 
impartial nationalism.^ He alone refused to recognize the ri- 
valry of interests between North and South, East and West, 
that were rapidly developing throughout his term, and he paid 
for his persistent nationalism by a splendid isolation. From 
the very outset he had to meet dogged opposition. Fifteen of 
the forty-one senators voted against the confirmation of Clay. 
Although the electors of all the states (except Connecticut) 

lAt the age of eleven he had accompanied his father on a diplomatic mission 
to France (1778), and had subsequently served as secretary, minister, or special 
envoy at the courts of Russia, Prussia, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and 
England. He had been a United States senator from Massachusetts for ten years 
when Monroe appointed him Secretary of State in 1817 — an office which he fiilled 
with conspicuous success during both of Monroe's terms. 

2 He even wished to keep Monroe's cabinet intact, only filling the vacancies 
caused by his own and Calhoun's elevation. He asked Crawford to continue in 
the Treasury and wanted Jackson to serve as Secretary of War. But neither of 
these rivals would enter the cabinet, and Adams filled the vacant places with 
Richard Rush of Pennsylvania and James Barbour of Virginia. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



335 



that had voted for Adams had also voted for Calhoun as vice 
president, the latter declared his opposition to the administra- 
tion as soon as Clay was appointed to the cabinet. He used 
his position as President of the Senate to appoint committees 
hostile to Adams and allowed John Randolph to abuse the Presi- 
dent to his heart's content on the floor of the Senate. Van 
Buren, a senator from New York and a boss of the famous 
Albany Regency/' who had resorted to trickery in the attempt 
to get the legislature of his state to cast its electoral vote for 
Crawford, made opposition to every measure of the Adams ad- 
ministration a matter of principle^ quite irrespective of the 
merits of the questions. On one occasion, when the President's 
supporters won a victory in the Senate, he remarked, ^'They 
have beaten us by a few votes, . . . but if they had only taken 
the other side we should have had them." And all the time 
Andrew Jackson's tireless lieutenants were harping on the 
theme of the ^^corrupt bargain" and rousing the ^^plain people" 
to redress the wrong by which an intriguing and aristocratic 
House of Representatives had been able to thwart their will.^ 
The Republican party divided then into the Adams-Clay 
wing and the Jackson-Calhoun-Crawford wing. The former 
came to be known as National Republicans, because of their 
adhesion to the nationalistic program of the decade following 
the War of 1812. The latter returned to the old states'-rights 
doctrine of the Jeffersonian school, denouncing the intimate 
connection of the money power with national politics, opposing 
the tariff as detrimental to the staple industry of the South, and 
realizing ever more clearly the danger to the slavery interests 

1 Jackson was the choice of the people, his supporters said, and therefore 
entitled to the presidency. But the claim has no foundation. Our presidents are 
not elected by popular vote, nor is there any proof that the vote of the coun- 
try at large in 1824 would have been cast for Jackson. Legislatures chose the 
electors in one fourth of the states, and in those states where the people chose 
them the majority of the votes were not cast for Jackson. Nor did Jackson 
himself seem to think that any injustice had been done to him in the method of 
the election. He congratulated Adams on the evening of his choice by the House. 
But when Clay was appointed and confirmed, Jackson resigned from the Senate 
and began the four years' campaign which was to carry him triumphantly into 
the White House. 



336 ,THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



of the extension of the power of the national government over 
the territories. They claimed to be the genuine Democratic 
Republicans, and resuscitated the party name of Democrat," 
which had been dropped a generation before, when the excesses 
of the French Revolution had brought it into disrepute. 

The new party lines were not drawn with the distinctness 
which had separated the old Federalists and Republicans in 
Washington's administration. Our country was much larger 
and its interests were much more varied and complicated. 
The West, for example, which formed but 3 per cent of the 
population in 1790, counted 32 per cent in 1820, and by the 
census of the latter year was entitled to 47 of the 213 seats in 
the House. Nine of the twenty-four states in the Union at the 
beginning of John Quincy Adams's administration lay west of 
the Alleghenies, giving them three eighths of the seats in the 
Senate. The material interests of the West seemed on the whole 
to lie with the Adams-Clay school, which favored internal im- 
provements at national expense and a tariff for their wool, 
hemp, iron, and lead; but the intense democracy of the new 
Western commonwealths^ and growing pride in their self- 
sufficiency inclined them to the Jackson-Calhoun side. In the 
election of 1824 they had shown this conflict of sentiment. 
Indiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee voted for Jack- 
son; Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio for Clay; while Illinois 
and Louisiana divided their votes between Jackson and Adams. 
Finally, as events were soon to show, there was no real identity 
of interests between Jackson and Calhoun. They only made 
common cause for the moment against Adams and Clay. 

Adams realized the embarrassing position in which he was 
placed. Addressing his first Congress (in which the adminis- 
tration candidate for Speaker of the House was elected by a 
margin of only five votes), he said, ^'Less possessed of your 
confidence in advance than any of my predecessors, I am deeply 

lOhio was the only state of the Northwest, and Louisiana and Mississippi 
were the only Western states south of the Ohio, that had not adopted manhood 
suffrage. In these states either the payment of taxes or the purchase of public 
lands or enrollment in the militia conferred the vote. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



337 



conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener 
in need of your indulgence." But if Adams craved the indul- 
gence of his congressmen, he had no intention of indulging their 
cravings. Office-seekers went away hungry from his door. He 
steadfastly refused to use the enormous power of the presi- 
dential patronage to build up a party machine. He declined 
to deprive men of office because they worked for Jackson or 
Crawford. A despairing editor-politician, after laboring in 
vain with the President to get him to dismiss a political enemy, 
left with the Parthian shot that Mr. Adams would find himself 
dismissed" at the next election. Adams was unwilling or un- 
able, also, to temper his policy so as to win waverers to his side. 
In his first message to Congress he went to such extremes in 
the advocacy of internal improvements that even Henry Clay 
was somewhat taken aback. Many of the President's friends 
were alienated, and his enemies made the message an occasion 
for the charge that he was aiming to revive the old Federalist 
party and principles.^ Thomas Jefferson, now in his eighty- 
third year, wrote to Madison from Monticello, in his alarm for 
the preservation of the rights of the states, suggesting that a 
public protest based on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions 
of 1798 should be issued. Adams failed to win support for his 
national policy and was obliged to confine his recommendations 
to the modest limits prescribed in the bill of April, 1824 — ap- 
propriations for the surveys and plans of roads projected as 
national highways, for the repair of existing roads, and for the 
purchase of stock in private companies (controlled by state 
laws) for the construction of canals. Any national work on the 
scale of the great Erie Canal, which was opened with imposing 
festivities only a few weeks before he sent his first message to 

^Thomas H. Benton says, in his "Thirty Years' View": "The declaration of 
principles which would give so much power to the government, and the danger 
of which had just been so fully set forth by Mr. Monroe in his veto of the 
Cumberland Road bill, alarmed the old Republicans and gave new grounds of 
opposition to President Adams' administration in addition to the strong one 
growing out of the election in the House of Representatives." Crawford wrote 
to Henry Clay, "The whole of his [Adams's] first message to Congress is re- 
plete with doctrines which I hold to be unconstitutional." 



338 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Congress, Adams was not destined to inaugurate. The net re- 
sult of his ardor for internal improvements was to furnish his 
enemies another arrow for their quiver. 

Three events in Adams's administration illustrate from dif- 
ferent angles the sectional opposition to his broad policy of 
national control : the Panama mission, the quarrel with Georgia 
over the Indian lands within her borders, and the tariff of 1828. 

The new republic of Colombia, with the great ^^iberator'' 
Simon Bolivar as its president, took the lead in organizing a 
confederation of the Latin-American states. Treaties were made 
with Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and INIexico in the years 1823- 
182 5, forming a military league and providing for a congress of 
the states to cement ^4n a most solid and stable manner the 
intimate relations which ought to exist between all and every 
one of them." The ministers from Colombia and jMexico ap- 
proached Clay in the spring of 1825 on the subject of the 
participation of the United States in the congress, which was 
appointed to meet at Panama, and found in the Secretary an 
enthusiastic partner. President Adams, however, asked first 
to be informed on the subjects which the congress proposed to 
discuss, on the powers to be granted to the delegates, and on 
the methods of procedure. He told Clay to make it clear to the 
ministers that the United States would not join a military 
league for prosecuting a war with Spain. When the answers 
to Adams's questions came in November, 1825, they proved 
very unsatisfactory. No details of powers or procedure were 
given ; only the general purpose was repeated of joint resistance 
of the American republics to European interference. This the 
South Americans interpreted as the meaning of the Monroe 
Doctrine. It was, of course, far removed from Monroe's in- 
tention to pledge the United States to go to war on the judgment 
and initiation of the Latin-American states. Adams wanted the 
Ignited States to be represented at Panama, however, and in his 
message to Congress on the subject, in the winter of 1825, he 
gave his own interpretation of the purpose of the meeting, 
dwelling on the opportunity of improving our commerce with 
Latin America, of forwarding the principles of maritime neu- 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



339 



trality, and even of exerting the moral influence of the United 
States for the advancement of religious liberty. 

But behind these amiable considerations of commercial policy 
and missionary zeal there was involved a very definite question 
of American expansion and the slavery interests. The rich island 
colonies of Cuba and Porto Rico offered a tempting prize to 
European nations in Spain's extremity. As Secretary of State in 
Monroe's cabinet, Adams had already warned our ministers 
abroad that the United States could not allow France to seize 
these islands in her crusade to reestablish absolutism in Spain, or 
England to take them as a reward for alliance with Spain in de- 
feating the French invasion. He had even gone so far as to say 
that in looking forward half a century it was ^'impossible to 
resist the conviction that the annexation of Cuba to the United 
States" would be ^'indispensable to the continuation of the 
Union itself." The danger of the seizure of the islands by a 
European power seemed removed by the announcement of the 
Monroe Doctrine (although Clay made the appearance of a 
French fleet off Cuba in the summer of 1825 a subject for 
remonstrance) ; but there had arisen the new danger that the 
league of Latin-American republics might themselves under- 
take the liberation of Cuba and Porto Rico from Spain. 

Adams made it clear that his object was to preserve things 
as they were in the islands of the Caribbean, and Clay wrote 
to his friend Bolivar to dissuade him from plans of conquest 
there. Yet the Southern statesmen deliberately misrepresented 
the purposes of the administration. They professed to know 
the mind of President Adams better than he knew it himself. 
''It is clearly the intent of the President," said White of Ten- 
nessee in the Senate, "to enter into an agreement at Panama 
that if the powers of Europe make common cause with Spain 
we shall unite with Spanish-America to resist them." But it 
was clearly in the words of the President that he would do no 
such thing. The Southern senators maintained also that par- 
ticipation in the congress would mean indorsement of the plan 
to emancipate the blacks in the islands of Cuba and Porto 
Rico, and perhaps the establishment there of negro republics 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



like Haiti. Our participation in such plans was not for a 
moment dreamed of by the administration, yet senator after 
senator returned to the charge. Hayne of South Carolina 
declared that the discussion of slavery was not to be tolerated 
by the federal government or the free states, and that ^^on the 
very day when the unhallowed attempt should be made" to 
interfere with the domestic institution of the South ^^we shall 
consider ourselves as driven from the Union." Benton of Mis- 
souri protested against our entering into diplomatic relations 
with Haiti, ^'because the peace of eleven states of this Union will 
not permit black consuls and ambassadors to establish them- 
selves in our cities and parade through our country and give 
their fellow blacks in the United States proof in hand of the 
honors which await them for a like successful effort [of revo- 
lution] on their part." 

The Senate committee reported unfavorably on the Panama 
project, but the report was voted down and Adams's envoys 
were confirmed by the narrow vote of 24 to 19. It was an empty 
victory for the administration. One of the envoys died on his 
way to the congress, and the other arrived only after the meet- 
ing had adjourned. The congress itself was a complete failure. 
The net result of the whole business for the United States was 
the increase of sectional feeling. Especially ominous were the 
bitter debates in the Senate on the slavery issue in the congress. 

At the same time a long-standing controversy between the 
state of Georgia and the national government came to a head. 
When Georgia, in 1802, ceded to the United States her charter 
claims to lands as far west as the Mississippi, it was with the 
provision that the national government should secure by treaty 
the extinction of the Indian claims within the borders of the 
state. The matter had dragged on for a score of years before 
the government had acquired some 15,000,000 acres from the 
Creeks and Cherokees — scarcely more than half the immense 
area in Georgia occupied by these fairly civilized tribes.^ The 

1 Their total holdings in Georgia in 1802 were 25,000,000 acres, equal to the 
whole area of the New England states excepting Maine, and more than the area 
of the state of South Carolina, 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



341 



State was impatient with the dilatoriness of the government at 
Washington, its impatience growing to exasperation when the 
Western boom that had followed the War of 181 2 sent the prices 
of land and cotton soaring. In 1819 the legislature of Georgia 
began to protest, alleging not only that the government did not 
remove the Indians, but that by conferring citizenship on the 
Cherokees and encouraging them in the arts of civilization it 
was virtually assuring them of a fixed tenure of their lands. 
Troup, the energetic governor of Georgia, pushed the adminis- 
tration in the closing days of Monroe's term, but all the re- 
ply that Secretary Calhoun could get from the Creeks and 
Cherokees was that they would not sell one foot of their land 
nor would they exchange it for homes beyond the Mississippi. 
They sanctioned the penalty of death for any chieftain who 
should disobey the order. Nevertheless, some of the Creek 
leaders, induced by cupidity, signed a treaty at Indian Springs, 
February 12, 1825, by which, in consideration for $400,000 
and trans-Mississippi grants, they ceded nearly all the Creek 
claims in Georgia. The Indians were given until September, 
1826, to move out. 

As soon as the treaty was signed (the day after Adams's 
inauguration) Governor Troup began to survey the Indian 
lands. In spite of remonstrances from Washington and the 
dispatch of General Gaines to Georgia to protect the rights 
of the Indians under the treaty, Troup persisted in his course. 
The state of Georgia, he said, was sovereign on her soil, and 
the behavior of the President was unreasonable and extraor- 
dinary." The government of the United States was making 
itself 'Hhe unblushing ally of savages." The Indians were but 
tenants at will, anyway. Georgia must and would have the 
lands, even if it involved resisting the central government in 
arms. When Adams, convinced that fraud had been practiced 
in the treaty of Indian Springs, negotiated a new treaty at 
Washington (January, 1826) more favorable to the Indians, 
the legislature of Georgia denounced the treaty as ^^llegal and 
unconstitutional." The state, it said, had never devolved upon 
the central government that jurisdiction over its internal affairs 



342 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



which had become vested in its authorities with the extinction 
of the king's power in the colony. Adams received Httle support 
in the Senate when it appeared that persistence in his poHcy 
would involve coercing the state of Georgia. He was relieved 
from a most embarrassing situation by the conclusion of a 
treaty with the Creeks late in 1827, by which they finally gave 
up their lands.^ The significant fact in this controversy was 
the defiance of the administration at Washington by a ^'sov- 
ereign state." The victory remained with Troup and not with 
Adams — for the former had been heartily and unanimously 
supported by his legislature, while the latter had been left in 
the lurch by a factious Congress. 

But most serious of all the manifestations of sectional rivalry 
developing in the Adams administration was the controversy 
over the tariff. The growth of manufactures in the Northern 
and central states had been rapid and steady since the recovery 
from the panic of 1819. During the period of Monroe's second 
term the capital employed in manufactures increased from less 
than $100,000,000 to $160,000,000, and the number of workers 
employed from a few hundred thousand to nearly 2,000,000. 
Only about six per cent of all this capital and labor was to be 
found in the cotton-raising states of the Carolinas, Georgia, 
Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Every session of Con- 
gress from 1820 on saw the attempt on the part of the manu- 
facturers to get a new tariff bill passed, and their narrow success 
in 1824 was due to a dicker" with the Western states, by which 
the duties on raw wool, iron ore, hemp, and lead were increased. 
But still the woolen interests of the North were not satisfied. 
England had reduced the duty on raw wool, so that her factories 
were able to send quantities of cheap woolen goods to America. 
The only remedy for our woolen manufacturers was in a system 
of minimal valuations such as had saved the cotton industry in 
the tariff of 181 6 (see page 287). A bill incorporating this 
principle was passed in the House early in 1827, but was de- 
feated by Vice President Calhoun's casting vote in the Senate. 

^The contest was not settled until the Indians were forced by President 
Jackson, in 183S, to seek homes across the Mississippi. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



343 



This bill (the Mallory Bill) was the signal for a violent 
agitation over the tariff. During the long recess of Congress 
from March to December, 1827, resolutions of state legis- 
latures, conventions^, and mass meetings, indorsements and 
protests in pamphlets, newspapers, and memorials abounded. 
The closing of the British West Indies to American trade in 
July, 1826, had cut off a valuable market for the grain and 
flour of the West, without providing a compensation in the 
growth of a home market; while the sheep-raising interest 
saw with growing dismay the failure of the domestic woolen 
manufactures. It was not difficult, then, to get the Western 
states north of the Ohio to join with New England and the 
middle Atlantic states in sending delegates to a convention at 
Harrisburg in the midsummer of 1827 to devise a scheme of 
high duties under the name of the ^'American System." The 
South, at the same time, began in united fashion to resist the 
tariff on principle. A rise in price of woolens meant a large 
addition to the planter's bill for coarse clothing for his slaves 
and bagging for his crop, and an increase in the duties on iron 
meant higher prices for his farm implements; while any in- 
crease in tariff rates meant offending England, which took two 
thirds of his cotton crop. The legislatures of Georgia, South 
Carolina, and Alabama declared that Congress had no power 
to regulate commerce" for the sake of aiding domestic manu- 
factures in one section of our country, but only for the raising 
of a revenue; and that they intended to submit to no other 
interpretation of the Constitution than this. In an ardent speech 
at a large gathering of planters at Columbia, South Carolina, 
Dr. Thomas Cooper, president of the State College, asserted 
that the avowed object of the scheme of high protective duties 
proposed at Harrisburg was to tax the South for the interest 
of the North, to deprive them of their best customers, and to 
reduce them to colonies and tributaries" of the manufacturing 
states. ^We shall ere long be forced to calculate the value of 
our union," he cried, ^^to ask of what use is this unequal alliance 
by which the South has always been the loser and the North 
always the winner." 



344 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



When the inevitable tariff bill was introduced into the Twen- 
tieth Congress and referred to the committee on manufactures, 
the Southern members, realizing that oratory was powerless 
against interest, resorted to a scheme for defeating the bill, 
whose details were confessed by Calhoun to the Senate nine 
years later. Instead of opposing the high rates on raw materials, 
like wool, pig iron, and hemp, they raised them still higher, 
adding duties on molasses and cordage, which were used in large 
quantities in New England. The object was to make the duties 
on raw material so high that New England would reject the 
whole bill. Politics entered into the plan, also. It was the year 
of the presidential election, and the Jackson forces were la- 
boring with all their might to take the vote of the Northern 
states from Adams.^ It was agreed that the Northern Democrats 
should support the bill, thereby getting credit for being friends 
of the protective system, while at the last moment the Southern 
Democrats should vote against it and, with the expected aid of 
New England, defeat it. This clever scheme to kill protection 
by a homeopathic overdose failed. New England voted for the 
bill, bitter as its ingredients were, and it passed the House and 
Senate by the close margins of 109 to 91 and 26 to 2 1. President 
Adams signed it May 19, 1828. 

The passage of the ^'Tariff of Abominations" led to an out- 
burst of protests, threats, and warnings in the South surpassing 
that of the previous summer. Governors of states were appealed 
to, to summon legislatures and even, as one South Carolina jour- 
nalist wrote, ^Ho prepare for a secession from the Union." 
A boycott was urged against the manufactures of the North 
and the products of the West. Southerners would go in home- 
spun, as their Revolutionary fathers had done in the days of the 
^^Association" against England in 1774, and would starve rather 
than buy the beef and bacon of the Ohio valley. Toasts were 

iSome Southern statesmen went so far as to say that the tariff campaign of 
182 7-1828 was started primarily for political reasons, to secure the cooperation 
of the farming interests of the West and the manufacturing and commercial in- 
terests of the East in the support of Adams. John Randolph said that the 
only kind of manufactures the bill was directed to was ''the manufacture of a 
president." 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



345 



proposed at public banquets setting the sovereignty of the states 
above the authority of the nation, pledging independence as 
dearer than union. ^^Let the New England beware how she 
imitates the Old/' was the contribution of C. C. Pinckney of 
South Carolina. McDuffie called the Stamp Act of 1765 and 
the tariff of 1828 ^'kindred acts of despotism." Immediate nul- 
lification of the tariff act was advised by some, and resistance 
^^to the last ditch" against its execution. Hayne of South Caro- 
lina rejoiced for the South and its liberties that the regular 
army of the United States was a mere handful of men." The 
voices of the ex-presidents Madison and Monroe were raised 
for moderation. Let a remedy be sought by compromise, as in 
the Missouri struggle. Let there be no talk of disunion. 

The election of Jackson over Adams in November by an 
overwhelming majority gave the South pause. Every state west 
of the Alleghenies and every state south of Mason and Dixon's 
line except Maryland and Delaware gave its entire vote to 
Jackson, and he had all the electors of Pennsylvania, 20 out of 
36 in New York, and 5 out of 11 in Maryland besides — a total 
of 178 to 83 for Adams. Although the Jackson men in the dif- 
ferent sections of the country were by no means agreed in their 
economic interests, here was a chance for the South to regain 
the alliance of the West on a political basis. Jackson might be 
the reconciler. He was known not to be keen for protection. 
He was a native of South Carolina. Further action on the 
abominable tariff of 1828 was postponed, therefore, until it 
should be seen what Jackson would do when he should assume 
the presidential office on the fourth of March, 1829. 

Meanwhile John C. Calhoun put forth his famous "Expo- 
sition and Protest" (December, 1828) denouncing the tariff on 
the score of its unconstitutionality and its offensive economic 
discrimination against the South. The pamphlet was only a 
resume of the arguments urged for a year or more past by 
various writers and orators of the South : the noncompetence 
of Congress to lay duties for the encouragement of special 
industries, the doctrine of the national government as a "com- 
pact" between the states, and hence the impropriety of permit- 



346 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



ting that government or any branch of it, like the Supreme Court, 
to set itself up as the final arbiter of the rights of the common- 
wealths which had created it and whose agent" it was. If the 
minority in any section of the country is oppressed by the legis- 
lation of the majority in Congress, the remedy lies in the 
reserved rights of the states when properly called into action." 
That such a minority was oppressed in the South by the tariff 
bills Calhoun showed by a mathematical demonstration. The 
Southern states, with their tobacco, rice, and cotton, furnished 
$37,500,000 out of the total $53,000,000 of exports from the 
country. It was the proceeds from these sales which paid for 
the goods imported. Hence some two thirds of the $23,000,000 
collected in customs duties on imports was virtually paid by the 
South. The fallacy of Calhoun's argument, of course, was in 
the middle term, which boldly assumed both that the South 
spent all her money for imports and that the North spent none 
of hers so. But whoever paid for the imports, it was still true 
that the South suffered by the tax on them. And this actual 
grievance was the sufficient basis, in the eyes of the South, for 
Calhoun's political theory and for his economic calculation. 
The ^'Exposition and Protest" marked Calhoun's break with 
the nationalism which he had so ardently championed in the 
decade following the War of 181 2. Henceforth he was the 
protagonist of states' rights and the interests of the South.^ It 
was he more than any other man who prepared the way for the 
great secession, although he protested, and honestly protested, 
his love for the Union, even to that March day of 1850 when 
his solemn voice, for the last time and from the edge of the tomb, 
warned the North that obedience to its conscience in crying 
aloud against the evil of slavery would mean the provocation of 
the South to sever the bonds which were a token of friendship 

1 Henry Adams, in his "Life of John Randolph," claims that it was the ardent 
and eccentric Virginian who converted Calhoun to the extreme states'-rights 
doctrine, "as he sat rigid and statue-like in the vice-presidential chair and lis- 
tened with pale face and lips compressed and hair brushed back over his im- 
perious forehead" to Randolph's doctrines prophesying slave emancipation as 
the result of arming the government with power after power — over commerce, 
public lands, currency, etc. 



THE NEW NATIONALISM 



347 



between equals but a symbol of servitude when the strong 
oppressed the weak. 

Into such an era of hard feelings had the tangled economic 
interests of East, West, and South converted the ^'era of good 
feelings" which marked Monroe's all but unanimous reelection 
to the presidency. The national government had been defied, its 
laws and treaties declared unconstitutional, and the very value 
of its existence called in question. ^'The hour is come, or is 
rapidly approaching," said a report of the Georgia legislature, 
^Vhen the states from Virginia to Georgia, from Missouri to 
Louisiana, must confederate and, as one man, say to the Union, 
^We will no longer submit our retained rights to the snivelling 
insinuations of bad men on the floor of Congress.'" 

The interests of the South were clearly divergent from those 
of the North and West on almost every important economic 
question of the day. She had no manufactures to profit by a 
tariff. The foreign market for her cotton was far more valuable 
than the home market. She had no need for improved highways 
and waterways to the West, for she had no merchandise to send 
over them. And, most serious of all, she looked with alarm on 
the rapidly growing power which a full Treasury and unre- 
stricted immigration were bringing to the financial and indus- 
trial centers of the North, while her own ancestral estates 
were being sold for less than they had been worth in George 
Washington's day. 



CHAPTER VII 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 

A more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must be 
established in America. — John Adams 

The New Democracy 

Democracy is a relative term. A literal rule of the people is 
possible only in small communities like a New England town or 
a Swiss canton. In large political units, like state or nation, a 
pure democracy yields to a representative democracy. Instead 
of '^government of the people by the people" there is govern- 
ment of the people by their chosen agents — with a great vari- 
ety of qualifications for both the agents and the choosers. 
The fathers of the American republic were not concerned to 
strengthen democracy on these shores. They made no pro- 
vision in the Constitution for enlarging the suffrage, accepting 
as qualified to vote for national representatives and presidential 
electors those whom the various states allowed to vote for ''the 
most numerous branch" of their legislatures. And the suffrage 
in the various states, in turn, was quite generally the same 
as in the old colonial governments, which were anything but 
"democratic." It is estimated that in Washington's adminis- 
tration not more than one male adult in seven was a voter, while 
the actual direction of politics was in the hands of a small group 
of "the rich, the well born, and the able," who regarded any 
disposition of the people at large to interfere with their pre- 
rogative as a kind of ungrateful impertinence. Even Jefferson, 
who was looked on as a dangerous innovator for his devotion 
to the "French doctrine" of the rights of man, confined his 
"democracy" in practice to furthering the interests of the com- 
mon people through the authorities already established instead 

34S 



THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 349 



of overthrowing those authorities. He made no campaign for 
the extension of the suffrage or the principles of ^'direct gov- 
ernment." In fact, the social soil of the old states, with their 
colonial traditions, was not favorable to the growth of a real 
democracy. 

It was out of the West that the impetus came. In those 
pioneer communities beyond the mountains differences of social 
rank disappeared. Men were few and they all counted. Vigor, 
self-reliance, industry, not birth, privilege, or wealth, were the 
test of citizenship. The constitutions which the new trans- 
montane states framed as they followed one another rapidly 
into the Union were almost all completely democratic, pro- 
viding for manhood suffrage, frequent elections, and popular 
control of the executive and the judiciary. The influence of 
the Western democracy on the Eastern states was continuous 
and strong. One by one the strongholds of privilege fell. The 
suffrage was widened, the election of many officials was taken 
from the assemblies or special councils^ and put into the hands 
of the people. Religious and property qualifications for office- 
holding were abolished ; public education was encouraged. The 
process of democratization was slow at first, but came to a 
rapid culmination in the decade of the thirties, when Delaware 
(1831), Mississippi (1832), Georgia (1833-1835), and Tennes- 
see (1834) all abolished their property qualifications for the 
suffrage. By 1840 Rhode Island was the only state left in the 
Union with the old colonial policy of exclusion still unmodified.^ 

Second only to the influence of the Western states in estab- 
lishing the new democracy was the growth of a prosperous 
wage-earning class in the manufacturing centers of the Eastern 

^For example, two small councils in the state of New York had controlled the 
executive and legislative departments until the year 1821. The Council of Ap- 
pointments of five members named about 15,000 officials, and the Council of 
Revision had the power to veto laws, 

2 Rhode Island kept its old colonial charter of 1662, which confined the suf- 
frage to property- holders, until 1842, when, as the result of an armed rebellion 
led by Thomas Dorr in support of a "Peoples' constitution," the conservatives 
were forced to call a convention and frame a new, liberal constitution abolishing 
the property qualification. 



350 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



and Middle States, which had been developing under the high 
tariffs since the War of 1812. This incipient proletariat was 
fruitful soil for the seeds of democracy. The workingmen, 
organized into unions, began to make their influence felt in 
politics. A Labor party held a national convention in Philadel- 
phia in 1833 and presented demands for shorter hours, higher 
pay, and sanitary reforms in shops and factories. It peti- 
tioned state legislatures to pass laws in the interests of labor — 
lien laws on buildings to protect mechanics from the loss of 
wages by the failure or fraud of contractors, relief and stay 
laws to keep debtors out of prison, school laws to give free edu- 
cation to their children, and anti-convict-labor laws to prevent 
the competition of prison-made goods with the products of free 
labor. The journeymen bakers of New York sent out a mani- 
festo to the public in June, 1834, protesting against a labor pro- 
gram of eighteen to twenty hours a day at starvation wages, and 
publishing a ^Vhite list" of employers who had nobly agreed 
to give the wages required." A pathetic appeal signed by ^^many 
operatives" in the cotton mills of Philadelphia represented the 
folly and injustice of employing children from six years of age, 
^'confined to steady employment during the longest days of the 
year from daylight until dark, and growing up as ignorant as 
Arabs of the Desert." Delegates from over a dozen trades met 
in convention at Boston in March, 1834, to form a general trade 
union of mechanics ^Ho settle dissentions between employers 
and employed" and ^^produce a friction of mind and . . . sparks 
of intellectual fire . . . which will electrify, enlighten and warm 
the whole body." 

The political significance of this economic and social trend 
was very great. Here were new masses of voters to be organized 
and kept to party allegiance not so much through the per- 
suasion of reason and principles as by the appeal to emotion 
and immediate material interests. The boss and his machine 
began to appear. Astute party managers flattered the ears of 
the groundlings. All the tricks of political advertisement, with 
shibboleths and popular catchwords, badges and banners, were 
pressed into service. Public offices came to be looked on not 



^^THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 351 



as honorable positions of civic responsibility so much as rewards 
with which to pay political obligations. ^Tatronage" became 
the allotment of fodder from the public crib. A classic remark 
of William L. Marcy of New York in a debate in the Senate 
in 1832, ^^To the victors belong the spoils," has fastened upon 
his name the unenviable and undeserved reputation of being the 
author of the spoils system." Marcy was only giving pictur- 
esque expression to an idea that had been long germinating. 
Some years earher, Edward Everett of Massachusetts had 
said, ^^For an administration to bestow its patronage without 
distinction of party is to court its own destruction." 

The man who was first to take advantage of these tendencies 
in our national politics, and with whose name the new democ- 
racy is indissolubly linked, was Andrew Jackson. He was the 
first president from the new West, the first to break through 
the dynastic" succession of Secretaries of State, the first 
since George Washington who owed neither his selection nor his 
election to any agency of Congress. He came into the White 
House fresh from the hands of the people," triumphant in a 
campaign whose chief rallying-cry had been, ^^Down with the 
aristocrats ! " The oft-described scene of Jackson's inaugura- 
tion on March 4, 1829, when the great unwashed" throng of 
farmers and laborers, of Western frontiersmen and rough old 
Indian fighters, swarmed into the White House to grasp the 
hand of the ^^old hero" of New Orleans and fought in most un- 
mannerly fashion for the sandwiches and orange punch, was 
looked on by dignified statesmen like Webster and Story as the 
opening of the reign of King Mob. But Andrew Jackson lacked 
neither dignity nor poise. He was even courtly, with the direct 
and ingenuous courtliness of the borderer. He was incorrupt- 
ible, intensely patriotic, devoted in his attachments — and in 
his antipathies. Trained by a long and hard schooling in mili- 
tary responsibility, he was rapid in decision, courageous in 
council, and vigorous in action. With the soldier's virtues he 
had the soldier's faults, exacting a servile obedience from his 
appointees, regarding dissent from his policies as insubordi- 
nation, and carrying the zest of battle into the arena dedicated 



352 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

to peaceful deliberation. His strong will he had never learned 
nor wished to learn to curb, and the generally successful outcome 
of his arbitrary conduct had fortified his self-confidence. Excess 
of zeal spared him the embarrassment of a lack of knowledge. 
His vigorous intellect was impatient of schooHng, and he pro- 
ceeded to conclusions on difficult and intricate questions like 
finance and banking with sadly inadequate light. 

It was in thorough accord with Andrew Jackson's character 
that he, first of all our presidents, interpreted his office as a 
direct commission from the people, appropriating to the full 
the ample powers given to the chief executive by the Consti- 
tution. Ever since the inauguration of Madison, Congress had 
dominated the executive. It seemed as though our government 
were approaching closer to the English model, with the executive 
as the mouthpiece of a parliamentary majority. We have seen 
with what almost humiliating deference John Quincy Adams 
waited on the will of his Congress. Nothing shows more clearly 
the change in the spirit of the executive than a comparison of 
Adams's pathetic appeal in his first message to Congress — for 
their indulgence" to a president who stood ^^less possessed 
of their confidence" than his predecessors — with Jackson's de- 
fiant toleration of a branch of the government coordinate with, 
but in no sense superior to, the president of the people's choice. 
Jackson was concerned neither to ^'manage" Congress, like 
Jefferson, nor to get into harmony with it, like Jefferson's suc- 
cessors. He rather let it go its own way in the interpretation 
of the Constitution, while he went his. He used the veto power 
freely, depending always on popular majorities at the polls to 
support his policies. For this unwonted exercise of his con- 
stitutional prerogative he was dubbed ^^King Andrew the First" 
and represented in cartoons with crown and scepter, trampling 
the Constitution under his sandled feet. In the House there 
was even talk of impeaching him. But however exasperating 
to Henry Clay and the other congressional leaders Jackson's 
selection of his "Pretorian guard" of advisers or his veto of 
bills or his removal of secretaries might be, there was nothing 
in all these acts that violated his oath to support the Constitu- 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 353 

tion, or that could by any strain of interpretation be charged 
against him as ^'treason, bribery, or other high crimes or 
misdemeanors." 

Although Jackson had put himself on record in a famous 
letter to President-elect Monroe, in 181 6, as an enemy of 
partisan appointments, declaring that men should be selected 
who were ^^most conspicuous for probity, virtue, firmness, and 
capacity, without regard to party," he threw his doctrine to 
the winds when he himself entered the presidency. Heads of 
bureaus, chief clerks of departments, collectors and surveyors 
of customs, registrars of land offices, naval officers, marshals, 
district attorneys, diplomatic and consular agents, with hosts 
of minor secretaries and clerks, were turned out of office. Be- 
tween March and June, 1829, over three hundred postmasters 
were dismissed. To have supported Adams in the campaign of 
1828, or approved the corrupt bargain" between Adams and 
Clay in 1825, meant an official's poHtical death warrant. ^^Ike" 
Hill, one of Jackson's most devoted henchmen, playfully de- 
clared that ^'the barnacles must be scraped clean from the 
Ship of State." There was undoubtedly some justification 
besides a political victory for a shake-up in the civil service. 
Many officials, by long tenure of power, had come to regard 
their positions as a prescriptive right, even after they had out- 
lived their usefulness. The wits of Washington spoke of the 
Treasury as the ^^octogenarian department." But the indecent 
and indiscriminate haste with which removals were made in 
order to build up the new Jackson machine" opened the door 
to incompetence and corruption. The clean sweep" was made 
with a very dirty broom. 

John C. Calhoun, who had been reelected to the vice presi- 
dency, expected to wield a large influence in the Jackson ad- 
ministration and to succeed the ^'old hero" in the presidency 
in 1833. For a single term was one of the Democratic profes- 
sions ostentatiously put forward by Jackson — until he became 
convinced of the desirability of a second term. Calhoun's serv- 
ices entitled him to great expectations. He had labored as vice 
president for four years in Washington to bring the Adams-Clay 



354 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



administration into disgrace and smooth the way for Jack- 
son's succession. He had thrown his enormous influence in 
the South in favor of Jackson, defeating whatever chances 
Crawford might have to contest the election of 1828. He had 
advised South CaroHna and her sister states of the South to 
defer any action on the oppressive tariff of 1828 until Jackson's 
administration should have come into office, believing that his 
opinion would have decisive weight with a president who was con- 
fessedly not very conversant with theories of taxation. But one 
thing after another came to spoil the influence of Calhoun and 
the extreme Southern wing of the Democracy with the adminis- 
tration. Martin Van Buren, a shrewd poHtician of New York, a 
Crawford man in 1824 but since then the chief lieutenant of 
Jackson in the state, was given the first place in the cabinet. Van 
Buren was bland, insinuating, and deferential^ a servant after 
Jackson's own heart. His influence with the President grew 
daily and was firmly established when he espoused Jackson's side 
in a social quarrel which convulsed the cabinet and the capital.^ 
Besides, Jackson, being a strong Union man, already scented 
danger to the central government and his own authority in the 
attitude of South Carolina on the tariff ; for although Calhoun's 
authorship of the Exposition and Protest" was not yet ac- 
knowledged, he was known to be moving fast in the direction 
of particularism and states' rights. 

The event which caused the final break between Jackson and 
the ambitious vice president, however, was the revelation, dia- 
bolically sprung by Crawford at the psychological moment, of 
Calhoun's ^'treachery" to Jackson a decade before. Calhoun, 
Crawford, and Adams had all been members of Monroe's cabinet 
in 1 81 8, when Jackson's conduct in the Seminole War had been 

1 Jackson's Secretary of War, John Eaton, had married, only a few weeks before 
entering the cabinet, a widow who in her girlhood had been known as Peggy 
O'Neill, the daughter of a Washington tavern-keeper. Stories were circulated re- 
flecting on Mrs. Eaton's character, and the ladies of the administration, beginning 
with Mrs. Calhoun, refused to receive Mrs. Eaton as a social equal or attend the 
functions to which she was invited. Jackson believed none of the scandal, but 
treated the charming, witty wife of his Secretary of War with chivalrous atten- 
tion. Van Buren, being a widower, was free to follow his chief in the same course. 



THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 355 



under discussion (p. 302 ) . Jackson had believed at the time, and 
had continued to believe, that Calhoun had upheld his action in 
the invasion of Florida then and that Adams had opposed him, 
whereas the truth was that Adams had upheld him and Calhoun 
had proposed that he should be recalled and court-martialed. 
When Jackson heard this new version of the affair, nearly a year 
after he had entered the presidency, he immediately called upon 
Calhoun for an explanation. The Vice President, greatly embar- 
rassed and anxious to restore his waning influence, shrank from a 
manly confession of the whole truth. He produced a labored 
and unconvincing apology for his conduct, which served only to 
make his offense doubly deep in Jackson's eyes. All public con- 
fidence and private friendship between the two men was 
forever ended. Shortly afterward Jackson entirely reorganized 
his cabinet in order to exclude the partisans of Calhoun ; and, a 
few months later still, Calhoun himself resigned the vice presi- 
dency and entered the Senate as the champion of the doctrines 
of state sovereignty and a weakened Union, which were most 
detestable to Andrew Jackson. 

The breach between the administration and the great leader 
of the South was far more significant than any mere personal 
or factional quarrel. It had a direct bearing on our national 
history. The South was anxious for an alliance with the new 
democracy of the West. She tried to play off the economic 
interests of the North against those of the West in the tariff 
controversies. She only reluctantly gave up her champion- 
ship of internal improvements (advocated by Calhoun as late 
as 1825) when the fear of increasing the power of the cen- 
tral government outweighed the gratitude to be derived from 
the benefited section. Soon after the opening of Jackson's 
first Congress the South made another bid for Western support. 
Senator Foote of Connecticut introduced a resolution late in 
December, 1829, limiting the sales of public lands in the 
Western states. Hayne of South Carolina replied, denouncing 
legislation which discriminated against any section of our coun- 
try. Warmed by his own eloquence, Hayne left the subject of 
the resolution and launched into a general condemnation of the 



356 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



North for its selfish policy of sectionalism, as shown especially 
in the high-tariff legislation. He declared that a way was open 
under the Constitution for a state to be rid of an oppressive act 
of Congress. When challenged by Daniel Webster to make his 
meaning clear, Hayne delivered a long speech on January 21, 
1830, in which he set forth the doctrine of the Exposition and 
Protest" in its full vigor. The federal government was but the 
trustee of the states, in which sovereignty ultimately resided. 
It could not, either in its legislative or in its judicial branch, be 
the judge of its own powers, for that would be to reduce the 
states to mere ^'corporations." Hence the federal laws were 
subject to review and even annulment at the hands of the 
sovereignties which had first called the federal government into 
being and conferred upon it certain specified powers. Thus 
"for the first time in the halls of Congress was openly asserted 
the doctrine that the sovereignty of the states was original and 
paramount, while that of the Federal Union was delegated and 
subsidiary." Webster's reply to Hayne on the 26th and 27th of 
January is considered by many the most powerful speech ever 
made in the American Congress. He took his stand squarely on 
the ground that the Constitution of the United States was the au- 
thoritative charter of government of the American people ; that 
it might be amended by the people, but must always be obeyed 
as the supreme law to which the officials in every state had 
pledged their oath of allegiance. He showed that the assump- 
tion by one state or another of the power to annul this or that 
law which it found unwelcome would result in confusion worse 
confounded. The government of the United States would 
become an absurdity. The Constitution would be a "rope of 
sand" to bind the states together, and we should be plunged 
again into the anarchy of the Confederation, from which we 
had been rescued by precisely the creation of a truly national 
government. 

Jackson, of course, could have no part in the debates of the 
Senate, but an opportunity soon came for him to show his colors. 
For the celebration of Jefferson's birthday (April 13) a banquet 
was arranged in Washington by a committee of Southern states- 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 



357 



men, who planned to use the occasion to exploit the great 
Virginian as the sponsor of the doctrines put forward by Cal- 
houn and Hayne. Jackson had meditated carefully on the 
situation, taking council of his advisers on the wording of the 
toast which he, as chief magistrate, would be called on first to 
deliver. He rose, lifted his glass, and, looking Calhoun straight 
in the eyes, proposed ^^Our Federal Union — it must and shall 
be preserved ! " Isaac Hill, who sat near the President, in de- 
scribing the scene, said: ^^A proclamation of martial law in 
South Carolina and the order to arrest Calhoun where he sat 
could not have come with more staggering, blinding force," 
Calhoun rose with the rest to drink the toast, his glass trembling 
in his hand. Jackson stood silent and impassive. Calhoun waited 
until all had sat down ; then he slowly rose and with hesitating 
accent offered the second voluntary toast: ^^The Union — next 
to our liberty most dear ! " Then, after a moment's delay, and 
in a way that left doubt as to whether he intended it for a 
part of his toast or for a preface to a speech, he added, "May 
we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting 
the rights of the States and by distributing equally the benefits 
and burdens of the Union." More toasts followed, but all 
interest in the feast was at an end. The company (more than a 
hundred at the start) had dwindled to thirty within five minutes 
after Calhoun sat down. On the morrow Jackson's friends 
secured from Crawford corroboration of the story of Calhoun's 
behavior in the cabinet meetings of 1818. From this moment 
it was certain that the enormous influence which Andrew Jack- 
son had with the new democracy of the West would not be 
cast on the side of alliance with the South Carolina school of 
statesmen. 

But if Jackson brought joy to the hearts of nationalists like 
Webster, Adams, and Clay in his determination to maintain 
the authority of the Union, he disappointed them in his no less 
positive determination to defeat their program of economic 
and financial centralization. It was a democratic Union, a peo- 
ple's Union, which he cherished. The people were great, and 
Andrew Jackson was their prophet. He looked with distrust 



358 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



on Congress as the seat of aristocratic privilege. Had it not 
thwarted the people's will in 1825? Calhoun and Clay were 
drifting far apart in their political theories, the one toward the 
pole of disunion, the other toward the pole of Federalism. 
Both were equally abhorred in Jackson's eyes, and each knew 
that the ^'military chieftain in the White House" was his 
enemy. As the Calhoun-Hayne school tried to alienate Jack- 
son's followers in the North by championing the cheap sale of 
public lands, so the Adams-Clay school tried to discredit him 
in the West on the issue of internal improvements. Clay got 
a bill through Congress in May, 1830, for the construction at 
national expense of a turnpike from Maysville to Lexington in 
the state of Kentucky. Jackson vetoed the bill, and the country 
at large approved his action. The era of internal improvements 
was passed, not to be reopened until the period following the 
Civil War, when the development of a vaster West demanded 
the ample resources of our national government. 

The most conspicuous example, however, of the President's 
leadership of the new democracy was his appeal to the people 
in his mighty struggle against the Bank of the United States. 
Jackson was not an expert in the theory of banking and finance, 
but he saw in the Bank a huge privileged institution with an op- 
portunity for sinister influence in politics through its grip on the 
business interests of the country and its arbitrary distribution of 
financial favors. He had the frontiersman's prejudice against 
corporations with accumulated capital, which kept interest rates 
high and discouraged the circulation of cheap and abundant 
currency. The Bank of the United States especially, by its 
power to refuse to accept for government dues notes which were 
not secured by specie, held the whip hand over the state banks 
of the West. Jackson did not begin the attack on the Bank, as 
is often asserted. A full year before his inauguration (March 3, 
1828) Senator Benton of Missouri denounced the institution as 
a private beneficiary of the public wealth. The Bank, he de- 
clared, held $3,000,000 of government deposits, from the loan of 
which it reahzed some $150,000 a year, to be distributed to its 
Stockholders, while the government was taxing the people for the 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 359 



payment of interest on its public debt. The surplus should be 
drawn out of the bank and applied to the discharge of the debt. 
Jackson was in thorough sympathy with Benton on this subject. 
In his first annual message, of December, 1829, he declared that 
a large portion of the people questioned the constitutionality and 
expediency of the law creating the Bank, and furthermore that 
the Bank had failed to provide the country with a sound and uni- 
form currency. The first of these statements was Jackson's pri- 
vate opinion, which he had no data to substantiate ; the second 
was not true. 

But Jackson did not judge the Bank on its merits.^ It was 
enough for him that it was an undemocratic institution, a privi- 
leged corporation. There were rumors that the branches of the 
Bank in Charleston, New Orleans, Lexington, and Portsmouth 
had contributed money to the Adams campaign of 1828; and 
the president of the Portsmouth branch, Jeremiah Mason, was 
charged by Levi Woodbury, a Jackson senator from New Hamp- 
shire, with partiality toward the anti- Jackson business interests 
of the state. Nicholas Biddle, the able and autocratic president 
of the parent bank in Philadelphia, denied the charges and main- 
tained that five hundred men less implicated in the strife of party 
factions than the officials of the Bank could not easily be found 
in the United States. The Bank was not ^^in politics." But 
Jackson would not be placated, even by the appointment of 
some Kentucky directors out of a list submitted by one of 
his cabinet officers. A lively correspondence on the subject be- 
tween Jackson, Biddle, Ingham (Secretary of the Treasury), 
Mason, and Jackson's lieutenants Lewis, Hill, and Kendall 
filled the summer months. In his second message (December, 
1830) the President returned to the charge, advocating a Bank 
without a charter, stockholders, loaning-privileges, or note 
issues — a simple branch of the Treasury, to hold deposits but 

^The Bank report of December i, 1829, showed assets of $100,000,000 and de- 
posits of $13,000,000, with $27,000,000 worth of notes outstanding. Its discounts 
amounted to over $40,000,000. The stock stood at 125 and the dividends were 
at 6 or 7 per cent. The stock was widely distributed both in America and 
abroad, and the notes were considered as good as gold. 



36o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



to do no discount business. Benton attempted soon after to in- 
troduce a resolution into the Senate against the renewal of the 
Bank's charter, but was voted down. 

Meanwhile the House, through McDuffie, chairman of the 
Ways and Means Committee, had made a report favorable to 
the Bank, which only inflamed Jackson the more against ^Hhe 
hydra of corruption." The contest spread to the country; state 
legislatures passed resolutions for or against the recharter. 
When Jackson reorganized his cabinet in the summer of 1831 
(p. 355), the new Secretaries of State (Edward Livingstone) 
and of the Treasury (Louis McLane) both proved to be friendly 
to the Bank. A new series of conferences was opened between 
the administration and the Bank officials, and a kind of truce 
was arranged. The government was to cease its attack, and the 
Bank was to refrain from a petition for recharter until after the 
presidential campaign of the coming summer. Jackson's mild 
words on the Bank in his third annual message gave apparent 
approval of this bargain. He said that he was content to leave 
the matter ^^for the present to the investigation of an enlight- 
ened people and their representatives." 

The approach of the presidential year is the explanation of 
this situation. Jackson, in spite of his advocacy of a constitu- 
tional amendment limiting the presidency to a single term, had 
no desire to relinquish the reins of government. Moreover, 
enough states had already declared for him for a second term 
to defeat such an amendment if proposed. He allowed the ad- 
ministration paper, the Washington Globe, to announce early 
in 1 83 1 that he could not retreat under the fire of his political 
enemies nor deny the people the chance to indorse his poHcies at 
the polls. His partisans saw the embarrassment of having the 
influence and wealth of the Bank arrayed against them in the 
election. Hence the truce. 

A very important innovation was introduced into our politics 
in the presidential campaign of 1832 ; namely, the national 
nominating convention. It was one of the most conspicuous fea- 
tures of the new democracy. The Constitution made no provi- 
sion for the selection of a candidate for the presidency. The 



THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON 



361 



framers believed that the electoral colleges chosen in each state 
would cast their ballots for men of their own choice. But it 
was inevitable, as soon as national parties were formed, that 
there should be found a way of agreeing on a standard-bearer of 
the party in the campaign. A canvass of the members of the 
party in Congress was the commonest method of nominating a 
candidate down to 1824, when the congressional caucus was dis- 
approved, by the growing democracy of the West especially, as 
arbitrary and aristocratic. It v>^as not right that the president of 
the great American people should be picked out by a few men in 
secret conclave in Washington. Crawford, the last caucus nom- 
inee, got less than half as many votes in the election of 1824 as 
Jackson or Adams, who were nominated by state legislatures, 
conventions, and mass meetings. But if the congressional- 
caucus method was too exclusive, the nominations by separate 
states were too scattering and uncertain. It was a third party 
of very minor and temporary influence in our national politics 
that hit upon the scheme, ever since followed by all our parties, 
of a national nominating convention. The Antimasons,^ origi- 
nating in New York State in the late twenties, held an interstate 
convention at Philadelphia in 1830. Nine states were repre- 
sented, and the plan was adopted of holding a national conven- 
tion at Baltimore in the following year to nominate candidates 
for the presidency and vice presidency of the United States. At 
the Baltimore convention of September, 1831, where thirteen 
states were represented, William Wirt of Maryland and Amos 
Ellmaker of Pennsylvania were nominated as the ticket, and a 
^'platform" was published in the form of an address to the 
people of the country to put down the archfoe of democracy, 
Freemasonry. 

^In 1826 a certain William Morgan, a bricklayer of Batavia, New York, had 
published a book revealing the secrets of Freemasonry. For this he had been kid- 
naped by a band of conspirators and spirited away. He was traced to Fort 
Niagara, and some time later a body was found iri the Niagara River — which 
was never proved to be Morgan's. Indignation against the Masons for this 
alleged murder grew to such a pitch that the party of Antimasons polled 33,000 
votes in 1828 and 128,000 in 1830. 



362 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The National Republicans followed the lead of the Anti- 
masons. On December 12, 1831, delegates of their party from 
seventeen states met at Baltimore and, with but one dissenting 
voice, named Henry Clay for president. The sectional charac- 
ter of the solid South" was already foreshadowed in this con- 
vention, not a delegate being present from South Carolina, 
Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, or Missouri. The National- 
Republican convention did not put forth a platform of prin- 
ciples, but it published an address denouncing the administration 
of Jackson for its abuse of the civil service, its partisanship and 
incompetency, its defiance of Congress, its attack on the Bank, 
its dependence on a kitchen cabinet of demagogues in news- 
paper offices and minor Treasury posts, its hostility to our 
judiciary, its treachery on the tariff, and its encouragement 
to the state of Georgia to defy the supreme law of the land in 
the Indian treaties (p. 341). The following May a Young 
Men's National-Repubhcan Convention" (called^ ^Clay's Infant 
School") met at Washington and adopted a positive platform 
for the party, advocating adequate protection to American in- 
dustry," ^^a uniform system of internal improvements," the 
final arbitrage of the Supreme Court in all cases arising under 
the Constitution and laws of the United States, and the main- 
tenance of a stable, honest, and trained civil service. These 
planks," with the support of the United States Bank, were 
taken over, a few years later, as the fundamental principles of 
the new Whig party. 

The Democratic convention also met at Baltimore, on 
May 21, 1832. There was no need for a presidential nomi- 
nation, for Jackson was already the acknowledged candidate 
of the whole party. The convention followed the President's 
wish in naming Van Buren for the second place on the ticket. 
Van Buren had been appointed minister to Great Britain on the 
break-up of the cabinet in 1831 and had actually sailed for 
London. When the Congress assembled in December the Senate 
rejected his name by the casting vote of Vice President Calhoun. 
It was a sweet morsel of revenge for Jackson to have Van 
Buren nominated for Calhoun's place, where he would preside 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON 



363 



for four years over the august body which had humiliated him. 
The Democratic convention of 1832 adopted the ^Hwo-thirds 
rule" for the choice of candidates, which has prevailed in the 
Democratic conventions to this day. The effect of these con- 
ventions, with their platforms and addresses, their review of 
public questions, their reports in the press, their recommen- 
dation of nationally indorsed candidates, was to stimulate and 
exploit the new democratic fervor and to bring out a large vote 
in the elections. Clay and Jackson stood out more clearly 
against each other than had any competing condidates since 
Jefferson and Adams a generation before. 

Clay was anxious to have the election fought on a specific 
issue and believed that the recharter of the Bank was the most 
promising issue for the National Republicans. ^^Now or never 
is the time to act," he said. Webster and McDuffie agreed with 
him. The Bank had a majority of supporters in both Houses of 
Congress. A bill for recharter would be sure to pass, therefore, 
and would impale Jackson on the horns of a dilemma. If the 
President signed the bill he would be convicted of inconsistency 
with his position of 1829 and 1830 ; if he vetoed it he would lose 
the support of the great state of Pennsylvania and be rebuked 
in the election by the constituencies of the majority of the 
congressmen who had voted for the bill. A report of September, 
1 83 1, showed the Bank to be in excellent condition, its stock 
high, its liabilities modest, its loans all secured, its dividends 
steady at 7^ per cent. President Biddle, in spite of his hostility 
to Jackson, wished to keep the Bank out of the campaign, 
observing the compact made with the Secretaries. McLane, 
from the administration side, warned the friends of the Bank 
not to precipitate the question of a recharter. But Clay con- 
fidently and jubilantly overbore all opposition. He secured the 
introduction into the Senate, on March 13, 1832, of a bill 
providing for the extension of the charter (with a few inconsid- 
erable amendments) for a period of fifteen years after its ex- 
piration on March 3, 1836. The bill was passed by votes of 28 
to 25 in the Senate and 107 to 85 in the House. It went to the 
President on July 4, and six days later came back with his veto. 



364 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The veto message was the most vigorous one ever written by 
an American president. ^'It had all the fury," wrote Biddle, 
^^of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage.'^ Jackson 
condemned the Bank as an aristocratic, un-American institution, 
over $8;00o,ooo of whose stock was in the hands of foreigners. 
It fostered sectional jealousy by making the West the financial 
tributary of the East, since the nine trans-Allegheny states, with 
only $140,000 of stock on which to receive dividends, were 
paying over $1,600,000 interest on its loans. It enriched its 
stockholders by dividing among them the interest on millions 
of the public money held on deposit. It tyrannized over the 
state banks, arbitrarily interfering with the financial condition 
of the various sections of the country by its power to regulate 
discount rates and give or withhold loans. Even if it had been 
declared constitutional in John Marshall's famous decision of 
T819, that did not mean that it must or ought to be established. 
The President in his executive capacity was as fully entitled to 
judge what were the agencies ^'necessary and proper" to his 
duties under the Constitution as was Congress in its legislative 
capacity or the Supreme Court in its judicial capacity. ^^Each 
public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution 
swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as 
it is understood by others. . . . The opinion of the judges has 
no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Con- 
gress has over the judges ; and on that point the President is 
independent of both." 

Clay and Biddle were delighted with the veto. They believed 
that it would disrupt the President's party. The respectable 
men of the East would not vote for a demagogue who wished to 
knock the bottom out of their financial security nor for a despot 
who proclaimed the president's will supreme in the interpreta- 
tion of the Constitution. But Clay and Biddle were mistaken. 
They depended on the educated and reasoning classes ; Jackson 
relied on the masses. The vast majority of the voters knew 
nothing of the constitutional argument for or against the Bank. 
They did not come into contact with the Bank at all as de- 
positors or stockholders. What little money they handled was 



THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 365 



in the form of state bank notes. But they beUeved in Andrew 
Jackson, the democrat, the ^'old hero," and when he said that 
the Bank was a monster," that it was the instrument of a 
bloated aristocracy robbing the poor of their money and sending 
the rates of interest up for the borrower, they ralHed to his call 
for its overthrow. State after state gave its vote to Jackson 
when the elections were held in the autumn of 1832/ When the 
returns were all in, it was found that Clay had carried only the 
six states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Dela- 
ware, Kentucky, and Maryland, with 49 electoral votes. Wirt, 
the Antimason candidate, carried Vermont, and Jackson the 
other sixteen states, with 219 electoral votes. The popular vote 
was 687,502 for Jackson and 530,187 for Clay. Jackson had 
appealed to the people over the head of Congress, in the face 
of a strong and wealthy corporation,^ against the most powerful 
rival the opposition party could furnish. He could embark on 
the important measures of his second administration confident 
in the indorsement of the American people. 

A French scholar and publicist, Alexis de Tocqueville, came 
to our country in 1831 with a commission from his government 
to investigate our prison system. Tocqueville's interest widened 
into a study of the whole machinery of our government and of 
the spirit of our institutions. His famous treatise on ^'Democ- 
racy in America" was the result. At the close of a section 
entitled ''What are the chances of the duration of the American 
Union and what dangers threaten it?" he gives the following 
estimate of Jackson's character: "We have been told that 
President Jackson is an energetic man, prone by nature and 
habit to the use of force, covetous of power and a despot by 
inclination. All this may be true, but the inferences that are 
drawn from these truths are very erroneous. It has been 
imagined that General Jackson is bent on establishing a des- 
alt was not until January, 184S, that an act of Congress was passed fixing the 
first Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the uniform day for choos- 
ing presidential electors in all the states. 

-The Bank spent over $50,000 on the campaign against Jackson. It is tTue 
that this was after his veto message and hence was a measure of self-protection, 



366 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



potism in America, introducing a military spirit and giving a 
degree of influence to the central authority which cannot but be 
dangerous to the provincial [state] liberties. But in America 
the time for similar undertakings and the age for men of this 
kind is not yet come [ ! ] ; if General Jackson had thought of 
exercising his authority in this manner, he would infallibly have 
forfeited his political station, and compromised his life. . . . 
Far from wishing to extend the Federal power, the President 
belongs to a party which is desirous of limiting that power to the 
clear and precise letter of the Constitution. He was placed in 
this lofty station by the passions which are most opposed to the 
central government. It is by perpetually flattering these pas- 
sions that he maintains his station and his popularity. General 
Jackson is the slave of the majority ; he yields to its wishes, its 
propensities, its demands — say rather anticipates and forestalls 
them. ... He appears to me, if I may use the American ex- 
pression, to be a Federalist by taste and a Republican by calcu- 
lation. General Jackson stoops to gain the favor of the majority, 
but when he feels that his popularity is secure, he overthrows all 
obstacles in the pursuit of the objects which the community 
approves or of those which it does not regard with jealousy. 
Supported by a power which his predecessors never had, he 
tramples on his personal enemies, whenever they cross his path, 
with a facility without example. He takes upon himself responsi- 
bility for measures which no one before him would have ven- 
tured to attempt. He even treats the national representatives 
with a disdain approaching to insult. He puts his veto on 
the laws of Congress, and frequently neglects even to reply to 
that powerful body. He is a favorite who sometimes treats his 
master roughly. The power of General Jackson perpetually 
increases, but that of the President declines ; in his hands the 
Federal government is strong, but it will pass enfeebled into the 
hands of his successor." 

Such was the distinguished foreigner's estimate, curiously 
compounded of truth and error, of the man who was the 
incarnation of the new American democracy. 



^^THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 



367 



Nullification 

Four days after Jackson had vetoed the Bank bill he signed 
the new tariff bill. By the first act he bade defiance to the Clay- 
Adams- Webster program in Congress; by the second he de- 
stroyed the last hope of the Calhoun-Hayne-McDuffie forces 
for support from the administration. Ever since the appearance 
of Calhoun's ^Trotest" against the Tariff of Abominations" 
in December, 1828, the offended South had been waiting with 
fluctuating hopes and fears for relief at the hands of the 
Southern, slaveholding, states'-rights president who had de- 
feated John Quincy Adams. That he was heretically indifferent 
on the tariff they knew,^ but his championship of the state of 
Georgia in her conflict with Congress and the Supreme Court 
in the Cherokee Indian affair encouraged them to believe 
that he would defend also the interests of his native state of 
South Carolina. 

Meanwhile the progress of the opposition to the tariff in South 
Carolina was steady. George McDuffie of South Carolina, the 
chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House and 
an extreme advocate of state sovereignty, delivered a speech on 
April 29, 1830, in support of an amendment to the tariff, to 
reduce the duties on woolen and cotton goods, iron, hemp, 
indigo, and molasses to the levels which had prevailed before 
1824. McDuffie developed the economic argument against the 
protective tariff, as Calhoun had developed the constitutional 
argument. He maintained that those who produce the exports 
of a country pay the duty on the imports, and consequently drew 
the deduction that because the cotton and rice states of the 
South furnished more than half the exports, they paid more than 
one half the revenue duties, though they constituted only one 
fifth of the population and consumed less than one fifth of the 
imports. The Northern majority in Congress, ^^the representa- 

iQn the subject of the tariff Iredell wrote impatiently to Mangum of North 
Carolina, February 4, 1832 : "Why does not General Jackson come out upon it ! 
Why this studied equivocation in aU his messages — Who can understand on 
which side he is ? " 



368 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



tives of those who receive the, bounty and put it in their pockets," 
were thus ^'laying the iron hand of unconstitutional and lawless 
taxation upon the people of the Southern States." Since the 
government had degraded itself into a partisan of the stronger 
interest," no course remained to the outraged minority except to 
resist the execution of the tariff acts. McDuffie's open threat of 
nullification on the floor of Congress, at a moment when plans 
for a reduction of the tariff were already under consideration/ 
added to the large majority by which his amendment was voted 
down. But his defiant speech was the trumpet call to the 
disaffected elements of the South. 

A battle royal was waged in South Carolina between the nul- 
lifiers and the antinullifiers, who were nicknamed the "nullies" 
and the ^'submission men" respectively. The ^^nullies" had to 
gain a two-thirds majority in both branches of the state legis- 
lature in order to issue a call for a state convention. To that 
end they enlisted the power of the press, held rallies, mass 
meetings, and public banquets, and sent out appeals to their 
sister states of the South. One paper declared that the system 
of '' plunder and robbery on a large scale by unconstitutional 
law" must be resisted, though resistance ''might lead to disunion 
and' possible bloodshed." The North would not dare to push the 
cotton states to the extreme of secession, said McDuffie ; for then 
the South, exporting her $40,000,000 of produce, would control 
the imports of foreign merchandise and cut off the revenues 
which were enriching "the other parts of the Confederacy." 
Charleston would rival New York, and the wealth of the North 
would be shifted to the commercial centers of the South. The 
mills of Providence and Lowell would be silenced. The busy 
centers of industry in the New England States "would exhibit 
one wide unbroken scene of desolation and ruin." As for the 

^Just a month after McDuffie 's speech Jackson signed a bill reducing duties 
on tea, coffee, and cocoa. The near prospect of the extinction of the national 
debt gave promise of the reduction of the national income by a still further cur- 
tailment of import duties ; and even though these were so arranged as to protect 
the Northern manufacturer, they would still bring a measure of relief to the 
Southern consumer. 



THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 369 



submission men, who exclaim in most pathetic agonies, ^^The 
Union is in danger ! " and who conjure up frightful pictures of 
war and blood to alarm the timid, let them not impose upon us 
by so shallow an artifice. ^'The Union, such as the majority- 
have made it, is a foul monster, which those who worship, after 
seeing its deformity, are worthy of their chains." 

Few went to the extreme lengths of the fiery McDuffie. 
Calhoun, the real leader of the nuUifiers, always protested 
his love for the Union and maintained that his doctrine was 
the very guarantee of that Union as it had come from the hands 
of the fathers. In a long philosophical disquisition, filling six- 
teen columns of fine print in Niles' Register, Calhoun again 
went over the whole ground of the doctrine of ^^the right of in- 
terposition — be it called what it may : state right, veto, nullifi- 
cation or any other name." This right he conceived to be 
^^the fundamental principle of our system, resting on facts 
historically as certain as the Revolution itself, and deductions 
as simple and demonstrable as that of any political or moral 
truth whatever." Calhoun's language was calm, but his spirit 
was growing more defiant every month. The break with Jackson 
over the Florida matter had already come. The cabinet was 
being purged of his partisans. His friends were beginning to 
urge his name as the Democratic candidate to replace Jackson 
in the election of the coming year. Personal resentments 
and rivalries thus entered in to stiffen his argument. He 
was not merely contending for an abstraction — he was nursing 
an ambition. 

Nullifiers and Union men celebrated the Fourth of July, 1831, 
in Charleston with rival bands and banners, as they marched to 
their respective rallying-places for songs and speeches. In re- 
sponse to an invitation to attend the banquet of the Unionists, 
Jackson sent a letter which was read amid great enthusiasm by 
heralds at four points in the hall. It was an unsparing con- 
demnation of any plan or counsel of dismemberment. That, 
said Jackson, ^Vould begin with civil discord and end in colo- 
nial dependence on a foreign power and obliteration from the 
list of nations." The high and sacred duty of defending the 



370 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Constitution and laws of the United States, which he had as- 
sumed by his oath of office, would be performed at all hazards. 
To his friends and associates Jackson spoke in even stronger 
terms — of hanging the first man who defied the laws of the 
country to the first tree he could find, and of enforcing those 
laws in South Carolina, even if he should have to depopulate 
the state of traitors and repopulate it with a wiser and better 
race." Jackson was used to speaking in hyperbole, but none 
made the mistake of taking his exaggerations for mere bravado. 

When Congress met in December, 1831, the tariff became at 
once the subject of active debate, not only on account of South 
Carolina's threatening attitude but also because the abnormally 
high rates of 1828 were piling up a surplus in the Treasury 
just when the national debt was nearing extinction. It was 
estimated that the debt would be paid in less than two years, 
leaving surplus revenues of some $12,000,000. There were three 
propositions for tariff reform. McDuffie insisted that the bill 
should come from his committee of Ways and Means and suc- 
ceeded in introducing a sweeping measure for the hasty reduc- 
tion of all duties to a basis of 12^ per cent ad valorem rate. 
Jackson favored a more gradual readjustment, under the leader- 
ship of John Quincy Adams, chairman of the Committee on 
Manufactures, who was one of the moderate protectionists. 
But Henry Clay, in the Senate, was determined that no item of 
protection to American manufactures should be sacrificed. He 
confessed that the revenues ought to be reduced, but contended 
that the whole reduction should fall on such imports as did not 
compete with our mills and factories. If there was still a sur- 
plus, the government should spend it on internal improvements. 
Clay was confident, even elated. He had just been triumphantly 
nominated for the presidency by the National-Republican con- 
vention at Baltimore. He expected, as we have seen in studying 
the Bank controversy, to drive the Jackson administration to 
the wall. When he was warned that his extreme measures 
would provoke the South and the President, he replied that 
to preserve his ^'American System" he would ^^defy the South, 
the President, and the Devil.'^ 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 371 



McDuffie's ^'free trade" bill was promptly rejected by the 
House, partly on its own demerits and partly to rebuke its 
author for his intemperate sectional speech. The Adams Bill, on 
the other hand, which was carefully prepared on the basis of the 
Secretary of the Treasury's report of December, 1831, was 
debated for nearly two months. Clay's influence in the Senate 
secured certain modifications for the better protection of home 
industries, and the bill went to the President on July 9 with 
a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Congress. Jackson 
signed the bill five days later. The tariff of 1832 furnished 
some relief for the Southern planters in the reduction or remis- 
sion of duties on their supplies ; but it still left cotton and woolen 
manufactures highly protected, and registered on the whole a 
victory for Clay's American System." The vote showed a 
complete sectionalization of the country. 

It was for this disappointing result, then, that South Carolina 
had waited — too patiently, as she thought — for four years. 
From this moment her energies were concentrated on the nullifi- 
cation program. She ignored the national candidates Jackson and 
Clay in the campaign of 1832, throwing her electoral vote away 
on John Floyd of Virginia. Governor Hamilton had already long 
been a champion of nullification, and Clay's speeches of 1831 
had won the important municipal government of Charleston to 
the cause. In the state elections of 1832 a two-thirds majority 
in both branches of the legislature was secured, and a proclama- 
tion was issued for a convention to meet at the capital on 
November 19 to take action. The convention, in spite of the 
brave opposition of its little group of Union men, adopted an 
Ordinance of Nullification, by the overwhelming vote of 136 to 
26. It declared the tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 ^'null and void 
and no longer binding upon the state" after the first day of 
February, 1833. It ordered the state legislature to pass laws to 
carry the ordinance into effect and forbade any appeal to the 
Supreme Court of the United States on the validity of these laws. 
It enacted an oath of obedience to the ordinance and the laws 
passed under it from every civil and military official of the state. 
And it concluded with a threat that any attempt on the part of 



372 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the national government to coerce the state by shutting up her 
ports or harassing her commerce would be considered a just 
cause for secession: ^^The people of South Carolina, absolved 
from all connection with the people of the other states, would • 
forthwith proceed to organize a separate government and do all 
other acts and things which sovereign and independent states 
may of right do." The legislature immediately gave effect to 
the ordinance by an act authorizing the governor to call out the 
miHtia of the state and accept volunteers besides if necessary, to 
provide for defense against invasion by the forces of the United 
States. South Carolina, in the words of Felix Grundy, ^^had 
legislated the Federal government out of the state." 

President Jackson's reply to the ordinance was prompt and 
vigorous. As he wrote to James Buchanan, — then our minister 
to Russia and the man who twenty-eight years later, in Jack- 
son's own high office, was confronted not with the threat but 
with the fact of secession, — ^^I met nullification at the thresh- 
old." In a proclamation to South Carolina, dated Decem- 
ber 10, he declared in language that echoed Webster's, ^'The 
Constitution of the United States forms a government and 
not a league." He considered ^'the power to annul a law of the 
United States incompatible with the existence of the Union, 
contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, and 
destructive of the great objects for which it was framed: to 
say that any state may at pleasure secede from the Union is 
to say that the United States are not a nation." He wrote to 
Poinsett, collector of the port of Charleston, that on receiving 
notice of the attempt to carry into effect the Ordinance of 
Nullification he would have ten or fifteen thousand well- 
organized troops, equipped for the field, in the city of Charleston 
within ten or fifteen days at the latest. Jackson had already 
taken measures to give his words effect. General Scott was 
sent to Charleston, artillery was brought from Fortress Monroe 
to Fort Moultrie, two warships were stationed in Charleston 
harbor, the customs officers were ordered to perform their duties 
to the federal government, and the collector was authorized to 
transfer the port of entry to Castle Pinckney if necessary, where 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 373 



5000 stands of arms with ammunition had been sent subject to 
his orders. The President's proclamation was received with 
derisive shouts of laughter by the legislature of South Carolina, 
especially a paragraph in which he admonished them, "in 
parental language, as sons of his native state not to rush to 
certain ruin." Governor Hayne, who had succeeded Hamilton, 
was ordered to issue a counterblast, and the legislature went on 
with its preparations for the defense of the state. 

The situation at the opening of 1833 was critical in the 
extreme. The specter of disunion loomed portentously. Cal- 
houn had conjured up a spirit which he could not lay. He might 
persuade himself in his theorizing of the "peaceful" and "con- 
stitutional" remedy of nullification ; but when his theory, in the 
hands of practical men of action, began to bear its inevitable 
fruit of disunion, he was appalled. He was deceived in his be- 
Hef that the doctrine of nullification would enlist the support of 
the whole South. One by one the "co-states" rejected it. Virginia 
sent a commission to South Carolina to persuade her to repeal 
the ordinance. Mississippi denounced the doctrine as "subver- 
sive of the Constitution." If South Carolina decided to resist the 
government of the United States, she would have to do it alone. 
Calhoun was already receiving warnings of the punishment that 
waited for "traitors." He was ready for compromise, and in 
this compromise he formed an alliance with the man who was 
most responsible for the woes of South Carolina — Henry Clay. 

Clay's part in the transaction was motivated by his opposition 
to Andrew Jackson. He too wished to see the Union pre- 
served, and believed, further, that the laws of the United States 
must be executed. But he abhorred the thought of having these 
things accomplished by the "military chieftain" in the White 
House, the man who had just humiliated him in the campaign 
on the Bank issue and had received from the people another 
four years' tenure of power. As Calhoun, therefore, welcomed 
compromise for the sake of averting armed conflict between the 
United States and the state of South Carolina, Clay supported 
it to prevent Andrew Jackson from conducting the conflict. But 
the truculent sentiments attributed to the President by Clay and 



374 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



others of his personal enemies were not founded on fact. 
Although Jackson insisted that the laws should be obeyed, and 
asked Congress in a special message of January i6, 1833, for 
the grant of military powers to assure the collection of the 
revenues in South Carolina, he nevertheless encouraged at 
the same time the passage of a new tariff law to remove the 
grievance of the South.^ 

In fact, the two policies of the maintenance of the govern- 
ment's authority and the reform of the tariff went along side 
by side in the closing session of the Twenty-first Congress. But 
the House, loath to give satisfaction to the nullifiers, dallied 
over the Verplanck Bill for the reduction of the revenue, while 
the Wilkins Bill (the ''Force Bill," or '^bloody bill" as it was 
called by the nullifiers), empowering the President to use the 
army and navy in enforcing the law, was held up in the Senate by 
the opposition of Calhoun. There was a deadlock on the ques- 
tion of which of the policies should take precedence, and the 
end of Congress was less than three weeks off when Clay, to the 
astonishment of the Senate, introduced a bill for the gradual 
reduction of the tariff to a 20 per cent ad valorem basis, extend- 
ing over a nine-year period.^ He declared that he accepted the 
disavowal by South Carolinian congressmen and senators of 
any purpose of rebellion or secession, and that he wished to give 
the state (which had postponed action from February i to the 
end of the session) an opportunity to recede from a position 
rashly taken, by a bill which should relieve the South without 
wholly abandoning the protective system. Calhoun hastened 

1 Daniel Webster accused the President of not wishing a tariff-reform bill to 
pass, in order that he might have 'Uhe undivided honor of suppressing nullifica- 
tion." But Benton, who was much closer to the President and a better interpreter 
of his purposes, wrote : " Many thought that he ought to relax in his civil measures 
for allaying discontent, while South Carolina held the military attitude of armed 
defiance to the United States — and among them Mr, Quincy Adams. But he ad- 
hered steadily to his purpose of going on with what justice required for the relief 
of the South, and promoted by all means in his power the success of the bills to 
reduce the revenue." 

2 The scale of reduction was as follows: one tenth of the excess over 20 per 
cent to be taken off at the close of each of the years 1833, 1835, 1837, 1839; 
three tenths at the close of 1841 ; and the remaining three tenths on June 30, 1842. 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 



375 



to the support of the bill, rather disingenuously asserting that 
it met the demands of South Carolina. He even withdrew his 
active opposition to the Force Bill/' which passed the Senate, 
February 20, with but a single dissenting vote/ The clause of 
the Constitution requiring that bills for raising revenue should 
originate in the House stood in the way of adopting Clay's 
measure. Clay's ingenious quibble that his bill provided for 
the reducing and not the raising of revenue was hardly con- 
vincing; but a scarcely less ingenious way of overcoming the 
technical difficulty was found by Letcher of Kentucky, who in 
the last days of the session ^'amended" the Verplanck Bill by 
substituting Clay's for it in toto. The House passed the Clay 
Bill, and the Senate concurred, March i, 1833. On the same 
day the House passed the Wilkins ^Torce Bill" by a large 
majority, though the South Carolinians called it a brutum 
fulmen, since they had all voted for the compromise tariff, 
which settled the matter of resistance. On March 2 the Pres- 
ident signed both bills, and two days later he was inaugurated, 
under these happy auspices of reconciliation, for his second 
term. On March 11 the South Carolina convention met again 
and unanimously rescinded the ordinance of the previous No- 
vember. The nullification episode was at an end, and the fed- 
eral troops were recalled. 

As is customary in all political compromises, both sides 
claimed the victory. Yet the federal government had little 
cause to congratulate itself. The state of South Carolina did 
not repeal her defiant ordinance until she had forced Congress 
to make a drastic reform of the tariff. Furthermore, the con- 
vention of South Carolina, in the very session in which it re- 
pealed the nullification ordinance, nullified the "Force Bill" 
with complete impunity. Whatever signs of relief there might 
be in South Carolina, there were none of repentance. The state 
flag, with its emblem of the coiled rattlesnake and the palmetto, 

^Only 32 of the 47 senators voted on the bill. Calhoun and his followers left 
the Senate chamber just before the roll call began. Clay did not vote on the bill, 
either. John Tyler of Virginia, the future president of the United States, was the 
only senator who voted Nay. 



376 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



was everywhere displayed, while no sign of the national Stars 
and Stripes was seen, among the decorations at a states'-rights 
ball in Charleston in honor of the men who had volunteered to 
protect their state against invasion by the federal troops. 

Some historians have seen in the failure of the national 
government to ^^meet the nullifiers then and there upon their 
own issue and break the stubborn pride of South Carolina" the 
source of the country's woes a generation later. ^^The sword of 
civil war is always terrible to draw," wrote Schouler, "yet the 
worst slaughter in 1833 would have been light in comparison 
with that which followed the second provocation of this state less 
than thirty years later." ^ But to make South Carolina's seces- 
sion of i860 the outgrowth of the half-triumph of the "prin- 
ciples of disloyalty and dissolution " in her nullification doctrine 
of 1832 is a rash assumption. No event in our history more 
strikingly illustrates the truth of General Hancock's much- 
ridiculed remark that "the tariff is a local issue" than the 
nullification contest. It was essentially a quarrel between the 
United States and Charleston, the great port of the South. But 
the slavery issue was not "local." Slavery was the cause of the 
entire Southland, and, so far from being deterred from leading 
that cause by the memory of "coercion and abasement" suf- 
fered in 1833, South Carolina would have been, if possible, 
only the more spurred on thereby. 

Judged on its own merits and without reference to its possible 
influence on the events of i860, the doctrine of nullification is 
open to grave criticism. It was founded on an impracticable 
political theory, supported by unsound economic assumptions. 
The Calhoun-Hayne doctrine of a state's being competent at 
any time to interpose to suspend the operation of a law of 

1 James Schouler, "History of the United States," Vol. IV, p. no. So Augustus 
C. Buell, in his "Life of Jackson," Vol. II, p. 286 (note), says: "When South 
Carolina in 1860-61 led off in the movement which only an Appomattox could 
stop . . . she was emboldened by exultant reminiscence of having bullied a Union 
with Jackson at its head. What her behavior might have been had she been com- 
pelled to remember such a punishment as Jackson certainly intended to visit upon 
her, but for the pusillanimous compromises of . . . Clay and Calhoun, is yet, and 
doubtless will always remain, an interesting theme of historical hypothesis." 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 377 



Congress until appeal could be made by general referendum to 
secure the approval of that law by three fourths of the states 
meant, as Webster and others demonstrated again and again, 
only anarchy and confusion. We should have returned to the 
dismal days of the Confederation. ^^This everlasting cant of 
devotion to the Union, accompanied by a recommendation to 
do those acts which must necessarily destroy it," wrote an editor 
exasperated by Calhoun's philosophy, ^'is beyond patient en- 
durance for a people not absolutely confined in their own mad- 
houses." The economic fallacy which McDuffie brought to the 
support of nullification we have already noticed (p. 367). It 
assumed that the whole wealth of a country was measured by 
its exports and imports and that the exports literally paid for 
the imports, ignoring that major part of a country's wealth 
which consists of the distribution of its products among its own 
growing population. On this false hypothesis the South was 
led to believe that its distress was wholly caused by the pro- 
tective tariff, whereas it was in reality largely due to the unpro- 
gressive character of a stationary civilization and undiversified 
industry founded on slave labor. 

Furthermore, granted that South Carolina had a grievance in 
the high tariff, as she undoubtedly had, still nullification was 
precipitated on a waning and not a waxing issue. The tariff of 
1832 was less oppressive than the tariff of 1828, and still further 
relief was about to follow. President Jackson's successive mes- 
sages of 1829, 1830, and 1 83 1 show a progressive interest in 
tariff reform, and even the archprotectionist, Henry Clay, con- 
fessed that the surplus revenue must be reduced as the debt 
neared extinction. If the South Carolina leaders had spoken in 
the language of patience and conciliation instead of defiance 
and even abuse of the Union, they would have recommended 
their cause to a more sympathetic Congress and country. As it 
was, by their defiance of the law they shifted the issue from the 
reduction of the tariff to the preservation of the authority of 
the Union. 

President Jackson entered on his second term at the zenith 
of his popularity. He was adored in the West as the conquering 



378 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



hero who had fought the battle of the plain people against 
monopoly and privilege. Whatever dissatisfaction his veto of 
the bill for the recharter of the Bank may have brought in the 
conservative East was swallowed up in the rejoicing over his 
firm stand against the nullifiers and disunionists. He made a 
tour to New England in the early summer of 1833 was 
received with a welcome that almost rivaled that given to 
Lafayette eight years before. Harvard College conferred on 
him the degree of Doctor of Laws, to the great disgust of 
John Quincy Adams, who refused to grace the occasion with 
his presence.^ The cities vied with one another in providing 
pageants, reviews, and banquets until they almost killed the 
President with kindness. He was obliged suddenly to cancel 
his further engagements, in order, as his physician said, that he 
might get back to Washington alive." In the South he had 
made some enemies by his rigorous measures for the coercion of 
a sovereign state^ but South Carolina had been her own worst 
advocate and was left alone at last in her threat of disunion. 

In the few matters of foreign concern with which he had to 
deal in his first administration Jackson acted with prompt 
energy and success. Ever since the peace treaty of 1783 our 
ships had been shut out of the prosperous trade of the British 
West Indies by the Navigation Acts. Again and again (in the 
Jay Treaty of 1795, in the Treaty of Ghent, and in special con- 
ventions and diplomatic conversations) we had tried to get a 
relaxation of the laws which had led to a long course of quarrels, 
reprisals, tariff wars, and smuggling. John Quincy Adams was 
an unbending man, who, in spite of his long experience with 
European diplomatists, tried to force the British ministry to 
concede what he believed to be our just demands in the colonial 
trade. The courteous and insinuating Van Buren took another 
tack, even allowing our minister at London, Louis McLane, to 

lit is a sad proof of the blindness which partisan zeal can cause, to read in 
Adams's diary for the day of the ceremony, " Myself an affectionate child of our 
alma mater, I would not be present to witness her disgrace in conferring her 
highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of gram- 
mar and hardly could spell his name," 



<'THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 379 



represent that the people of the United States had rebuked 
Adams's foreign policy by the election of Jackson. The result 
of McLane's negotiation was the simultaneous removal of ton- 
nage duties by Great Britain and the United States, and the 
proclamation by Jackson, on October 5, 1830, of open trade 
with the West Indies for the first time in our national history. 
Jackson had the good fortune to prosecute his negotiations 
for admission to the trade of the West Indies just as Great 
Britain, under the lead of Huskisson, was breaking down the 
Navigation Acts. 

The fortunes of European politics also favored Jackson in 
pressing the French for the settlement of claims for depredations 
on our commerce under the Napoleonic regime. The reactionary 
government of the Bourbon Restoration was little disposed to 
assume any responsibility for Bonaparte's acts, but the revolu- 
tion of July, 1830, drove Charles X from his throne and replaced 
him with Louis Philippe, a liberal monarch of the Orleans 
family, under the restored tricolor. William C. Rives, our min- 
ister at Paris, concluded a treaty with the new government, 
July 4, 183 1, by which the United States was to receive 25,000,- 
000 francs in satisfaction of her claims, to pay counterclaims of 
1,500,000 francs to France for alleged infringement of the 
Louisiana Purchase treaty, and to make a considerable reduc- 
tion in the duties on French wines. The French government 
agreed to pay in six annual installments beginning one year 
after the ratification of the treaty. 

Success abroad and at home, the overwhelming indorsement 
of the people at the polls, and the growth of the habit of the 
applauded exercise of power made Jackson more and more of 
an autocrat in his second term. Opposition developed on several 
issues from various quarters, until the anti-Jackson forces were 
numerous enough to form a new party to contest the election of 
his designated successor in 1836 and inflict on him a humiliating 
defeat in 1840. But on the fourth of March, 1833, the poHtical 
sky was clear. We were at peace at home and abroad. The 
specter of disunion had been laid. Our trade was lively and our 
industries were prosperous. We were shortly to be, for the first 



38o 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



and only time in our national history, free from debt. To be 
sure, William Lloyd Garrison had begun the publication of The 
Liberator in his dingy printing-office in Boston, Nat Turner's 
negro followers had slaughtered more than three-score whites in 
the massacre of Southampton County, Virginia, and the first 
antislavery society had been organized in New England. But 
as yet the movement for emancipation was confined to a few 
''fanatical abolitionists." The cloud that was to gather with 
darkening menace until it should spread over the whole land 
and burst in the awful storm of civil war was still only the size 
of a man's hand. 

While the political excitement over the Bank charter and 
nullification was stirring the land, transformations of great im- 
portance in the economic and social condition of the people at 
large were quietly going on. The impetus of the newly enfran- 
chised democracy, growing ever more conscious of its power, 
was making itself felt in the reform of oppressions and inhu- 
manities in many fields. The noisome dungeons and madhouses 
in which criminals were herded began to be replaced by ''reform- 
atories" and decent jails. Cruel punishments, like branding, 
flogging, and the cropping of ears, ceased. The death penalty, 
which was inflicted in some states for more than a score of 
crimes, was gradually restricted until it was applied quite gen- 
erally only to murder and treason. The senseless custom of 
throwing men into prison for petty debts^ began to be aban- 
doned. Long and exhausting hours of labor on starvation 
wages, the exploitation of women and children in the factories 
and mills, the helplessness of the workingman in the hands of 
unprincipled and callous employers, the curse of intemperance, 
the debasing competition of prison labor with the products of 
free toil, the denial of educational opportunities to the children 
of the poor, were all the features of programs of ardent 
reformers of both sexes. 

In the summer of 1829 the first locomotive engine in America 
appeared on a short coal road at the terminus of the Delaware 

1 There were nearly 3000 in debtors' prisons in 1830 who owed less than 
twenty dollars. 



^^THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 381 

and Hudson Canal at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. A track built 
of wooden or stone rails had long been used for cars drawn by 
horses, and the stationary steam engine had been common in the 
later years of the eighteenth century; but the simple idea of 
combining the steam engine with the railway had to wait until 
far into the nineteenth century for its realization by the English- 
man George Stephenson/ The first railroad of importance in 
America was the Baltimore and Ohio, over which Peter Cooper's 
steam locomotive drew a train of cars in August, 1830, tak- 
ing the grades and curves satisfactorily at the average rate of 
1 5 miles an hour. Less than two years later this road, equipped 
with 300 cars, was bringing hundreds of tons of granite, wood, 
and pig iron and thousands of barrels of flour every week from 
^Hhe West" into the busy port of Baltimore. A mania for 
railroad-building spread through the land when once the practi- 
cability of the new method of transportation was assured. At 
the end of Jackson's first term there were 29 railroads under 
construction, with 1750 miles of track projected and nearly 
400 miles actually laid. Visionary" men began to talk of the 
possibility of traveling all the way from New York to St. Louis 
or New Orleans by rail. 

But adventurous spirits were already pushing out far beyond 
any dream of the terminals of the iron road, beyond St. Louis 
and the Missouri to the vast region of Oregon, and beyond New 
Orleans and the Sabine to the wilderness of Texas. In that same 
month of April, 1830, when Jackson gave his famous toast at the 
Jefferson dinner and McDuffie on the floor of Congress was 

^Some of the devices for locomotion in the earliest days of the railroad are 
very interesting. Cars were at first drawn by horses walking or trotting between 
the tracks. To prevent their wearing out the roadbed or stumbling over the ties, 
the horses were often put into the cars, which they propelled by the mechanism 
of a moving platform. The passengers sat on benches on both sides of the horse. 
Sometimes the cars were pulled up grades by cables attached to stationary engines. 
Even sail power was occasionally used on level stretches. The rails for the loco- 
motives were at first wooden joists with strips of iron fastened on top of them, 
but the curling up of the iron strips caused so many accidents that the all-metal 
rail was soon introduced. For an amusing account of the inconveniences and an- 
noyances of early railroad travel the student should read the experience of our 
English visitor Harriet Martineau, in her "Society in America," Vol. II, pp. 7-^3' 



382 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



threatening the manufacturing states with desolation and ruin 
if they drove the South to separation, the first traders' train 
over the Oregon Trail left St. Louis with 81 men, 10 wagonloads 
of goods, and 12 head of cattle. In the same month, too, 
the government of Mexico passed a law for the suspension of 
grants of land to American colonists in the province of Texas. 
The missionary and the colonizer followed the trader over the 
Oregon Trail, while the frontiersman and the land speculator 
went to join the American pioneers in Texas — the Austins, 
Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, and James Bowie. The stage was 
being set for expansion in the next decade to the Rio Grande 
and the Pacific. In more senses than one the birth of our great 
democratic nation came in those wonderful years of the early 
thirties when Andrew Jackson was at the helm of state. 

The Triumph of the Whigs 

When President Jackson suddenly interrupted his festive visit 
to New England in the summer of 1833 in order that he might 
^'return to Washington alive," he was already meditating the 
stroke of policy which was to precipitate the forces of opposition 
and finally to send his heir and successor, Van Buren, down to 
defeat in the election of 1840. The pages of our history are 
crowded with important events in those seven years which mark 
the culmination and decline of the Jacksonian era — with aboli- 
tionist agitation, industrial unrest, immigration problems, diplo- 
matic quarrels, exploration and settlement of the Far West, 
negotiations with Texas and Mexico, wildcat banking, over- 
speculation in lands, canals, and railroads^ prosperity and panic, 
surplus and deficit, the rise and triumph of a new political party. 
To some of these movements we shall revert when their 
influence on our national policy becomes acute. In this section 
we are concerned with the facts which led directly to the defeat 
of the Jackson-Van Buren Democracy. 

The recharter of the Bank had been blocked by Jackson's 
veto of July, 1832, and the veto had been indorsed by the people 
at the polls the following November. Yet Jackson was not 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 383 



satisfied. The ^'monster/' as he called the Bank, was a danger 
in his eyes and a thorn in his flesh. Its charter had still four 
years to run, and its champions boasted confidently of renewing 
the fight. Emperor Nicholas" Biddle had spent tens of thou- 
sands of the Bank's funds in the attempt to defeat Jackson in 
1832. Would he not spend hundreds of thousands to secure a 
Congress which would pass the next recharter bill over the 
President's veto ! There were rumors that the immense power 
of the ^^monster" would be employed to derange the financial 
condition of the country and bring discredit and defeat to the 
administration. Already two events had occurred which had 
convinced Jackson of the unworthiness of the Bank to be in- 
trusted any longer with the government deposits. The first was 
its postponement for three months, with the consent of the 
Secretary of the Treasury, of the payment of $6,000,000 of the 
3 per cent government loan of 1792, which fell due in July, 1832, 
and the secret arrangement with Baring Brothers of London to 
carry the part of this debt (about $3,000,000) held by foreign 
creditors as a loan to the bank at 4 per cent interest for six 
months or a year longer. The second event was the presentation 
of a bill of $170,000 by the Bank to the government for damages 
for the protest of a draft by which our Secretary of the Treas- 
ury had tried to collect the first installment of the spoliation 
claims which the French government had agreed to pay in 
February, 1833. 

Indignant that a corporation which was already profiting by 
the use of nearly $10,000,000 of public deposits should present 
a petty bill of damages to the government, Jackson determined 
to put an end once and for all to the ^'monster." He promoted 
one Secretary of the Treasury (McLane) to the State Depart- 
ment and summarily dismissed another (Duane) before he 
found in Roger B. Taney an agent willing to carry out his 
policy. On October i, 1833, Taney, in pursuance of a clause in 
the Bank charter giving the Secretary of the Treasury the power 
to remove the government deposits provided he reported to 
Congress, when it met, his reasons therefor, ceased to deposit 
the government balances with the Bank of the United States. 



384 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



In its place he used twenty-three state banks, called the "pet 
banks/' whose soundness had been investigated during the 
summer by Amos Kendall, a member of Jackson's kitchen 
cabinet." Taney did not immediately withdraw the balances 
in the great Bank, but the Treasury drafts upon it became 
heavier and heavier, until by March i, 1834, less than a quarter 
of the $9,868,000 of the government balance remained.^ 

When the Twenty-third Congress met in December, 1833, the 
battle was on. Henry Clay, the archenemy of the adminis- 
tration, led the attack by calling upon Jackson to submit to the 
Senate the paper which he had read to his cabinet advising the 
removal of the deposits. When the President indignantly re- 
fused to comply with the inquisitorial demand. Clay followed 
up the attack with two more resolutions, one to the effect that 
the reasons which Taney gave Congress for the removal were 
"unsatisfactory and insufficient" and the other censuring Jack- 
son for having assumed powers in his handling of the Treasury 
Department "not granted to him by the Constitution and laws, 
and dangerous to the liberties of the people." The Senate re- 
fused to confirm Taney's appointment as Secretary and rejected 
the President's nomination of a minister to England and four 
government directors of the Bank. In rejecting the nominations 
and Taney's explanations the Senate was acting within its 
constitutional rights, but it had no right to pass a vote of censure 
on the president of the United States. That high official is 
responsible to the people for fidelity to his oath to support the 
Constitution and can be brought to judgment only by the 
people's representatives in the lower House of Congress through 
impeachment proceedings on specific charges. The only func- 
tion that devolves upon the Senate in this connection is to act 
as a jury to pronounce the verdict in the trial. Jackson was 
the last man in the country to submit tamely to an invasion of 
his prerogative or to a censure of his conduct. He sent a vigor- 

1 Jackson also pocket-vetoed a bill of Clay's for the distribution of the pro- 
ceeds of the public-land sales among the states (a sort of variant of int>emal im- 
provements at national expense), which would have put some $20,000,000 into 
the hands of the states for roads, canals, education, and colonization. 



^'THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 385 



ous ^'counterblast" to the Senate, which that body in turn 
refused to receive, as insulting to its dignity and an attack 
on its privileges."^ 

While this unprecedented quarrel between the President and 
the Senate was coming to a head, the effect of the removal of 
the deposits on the Bank and the country at large was making 
itself felt. The Bank was of course obliged to call its loans 
and contract its discounts, to provide for such uncertain de- 
mands as the hostile Treasury Department might make upon it 
and to meet a possible ''run" by private depositors who saw its 
credit shaken by the government's attack. This readjustment 
of the business of the great Bank inevitably threw into some 
confusion the whole credit system of the country. Money be- 
came tight, interest and discount rates rose, business grew 
fearful, enterprise was unduly contracted, and the labor market 
was disturbed. Clay drew a melancholy, exaggerated picture 
of the industrial condition of our "bleeding country" in a speech 
before the Senate in March, 1834, dramatically summoning the 
Vice President to repair to the White House and tell his chief the 
doleful tale of depreciation and stagnation, of bankruptcies and 
ruin, and entreat him ''to pause and reflect that there is a point 
beyond which human endurance cannot go," before he should 
"drive this brave, generous, and patriotic people to madness 
and despair." To all of which Van Buren listened with amiable 
attention, and, when the harangue was over, left his chair and 
walked down the aisle of the Senate to ask the orator with bland 
politeness for a pinch of snuff! Webster retouched Clay's 
gloomy picture of the industrial condition of the country with a 
juster hand, but still the existence of "panicky" feeling in the 
spring and summer of 1834 was not to be denied. Petitions in 
great numbers came to Congress, and delegations waited on 
Jackson in the White House, begging for a return of the deposits 
to the Bank of the United States. 

1 Thomas H. Benton of Missouri, Jackson's champion in the Senate, fought a 
determined campaign of three years to get the resolution of censure expunged 
from the journals of the Senate, and finally succeeded, after an exciting debate 
mingled with hisses from the galleries, on January 16, 1837. 



386 



THE UNIIED STATES OF AMERICA 



Arguments and remonstrances only confirmed the President 
in his position. If there was a panic, it was caused not by his 
removal of the deposits but by the Bank's policy of revenge 
for the removal. Did not Biddle himself say that if the charter 
were renewed the financial difficulties of the country would 
immediately cease ? If such widespread ruin as Clay described 
was caused, as he alleged, by the interference with the Bank, 
it was the best possible argument for putting an end to so 
dangerously powerful a corporation. To the petitioners who 
came to the White House, Jackson replied testily: ^^We have 
no money here, gentlemen. Go to the monster, go to Nick 
Biddle. . . . He has millions of specie in his vaults lying idle. 
He is trying to crush the state banks and make me change my 
policy. . . . But I would rather undergo the tortures of ten 
Spanish Inquisitions than that the deposits should be restored 
or the monster rechartered." Finally, he declined to receive 
further delegations. 

In striking down the one great ^Hyrant" of the National 
Bank, Jackson had raised up five hundred petty tyrants in the 
state banks. By removing the stabilizer of the currency he 
had encouraged confusion in the standards of paper issues. 
His remedy for the evil was drastic. He would substitute a 
metallic currency for paper. He urged the coinage of gold, and 
his supporters, chief among them ^'old buHion" Benton, con- 
ducted an amusing campaign to popularize the new coins, which 
were dubbed ^'Jackson's yellow boys" and ^'Benton's mint 
drops." Nearly $1,500,000 in gold coin was sent out from the 
mint in the summer of 1834. Attempts were made to get the 
state legislatures to forbid the issue of notes under $20. But it 
was like turning the hands back on the dial of time. To return 
to a metallic currency after the use of so convenient and trans- 
ferable a medium as paper was like returning to rude barter 
after the introduction of money. Jackson only revealed his limi- 
tations in financial science when he indulged the hope of getting 
the banks to limit their issues of paper at the same moment that 
he was encouraging inflation by inviting competition among 
them for the government deposits. 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 387 



Jackson's high-handed conduct in deahng with the Bank and 
the deposits caused serious disaffection among his followers and 
gave Clay, Adams, Webster, and other opponents of his policy 
at different points the opportunity to consolidate their forces 
into a new party. All the popularity that Jackson had gained in 
New England by his firm stand on nullification in 1832 was lost 
by his assault on the national credit in 1833. His own state of 
Tennessee, to the end of his life, never again gave its electoral 
vote to the presidential candidate of his preference. The 
material out of which the anti-Jackson party was built was 
very diverse. There were old National Republicans, Kke John 
Quincy Adams, who regretted the failure of the government to 
encourage internal improvements; stanch states'-rights men, 
like John Tyler, who resented Jackson's threat to coerce a 
sovereign state ; financial interests injured by the derangement 
of the currency and banking-system; and Native American" 
enthusiasts, who deplored the swelling number of Irish immi- 
grants, enlisted generally under the Democratic banner. These 
disparate elements could not have been united on any political 
platform, but they found a common bond in their detestation 
of the ^'tyranny" of Andrew Jackson. The name which they 
adopted to signalize their opposition was Whigs." 

This name had never been entirely dropped from our political 
vocabulary since the days of the American Revolution.^ Its 
revival in the spring of 1834 to designate a new party in several 
of the Northern states is thus described in an article in Niles^ 
Register, of April 12 : ^'In New York and Connecticut the name 
^Whig' is now used by the opponents of the administration 
when speaking of themselves, and they call the Jackson men 
by the offensive name of ^Tories.'" A few months later the 
same journal notes: ^^As if by universal consent, all parties 

^For example, there was a New York Whig Club, whose object, like that of 
the City Club today, was to encourage the interest of the citizens in good gov- 
ernment. During the War of 181 2, when the Federalists were suspected of British 
sympathies, the name of "Whig" was freely used in opposition to them. The sug- 
gestion of the name as an anti- Jackson slogan came from J, WatSOn. Webb, the 
editor of the New York Courier and Inquirer, 



388 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



opposed to the present administration call themselves 'Whigs.'" 
In the autumn elections of 1834 the Whigs, combining some- 
times with the Antimasons and sometimes taking the title of 
^'states^-rights men/' made notable gains. They chose governors 
in Massachusetts and Indiana, state legislatures in Rhode Is- 
land, Ohio, Maryland, and Kentucky, and over 40 congressmen 
in half a dozen states. Outbreaks of mob violence were fre- 
quent at the polls, great numbers of immigrants and laborers 
newly admitted to the franchise being marshaled under their 
ringleaders to ''rush" the elections against the property-holders, 
the educated, and the "Native Americans," who saw in the 
rising tide of demagogism the ruin of American ideals. 

Before the Whigs had the opportunity to contest the suprem- 
acy of the Jacksonian Democracy in a national election, other 
important issues arose to vex the administration. Chief of 
these was the abolitionist agitation. William Lloyd Garrison 
had begun the publication of his Liberator at New Year's, 1831. 
In 1832 the New England Antislavery Society was formed, 
widening the next year into the American Antislavery Society. 
Moderate men in the North joined with the South in the effort 
to keep the dangerous subject of slavery out of national politics. 
They remembered the stormy debates of the Missouri Com- 
promise : the angry defiance of the Kings and the Tallmadges, 
the threats of secession and civil war from the Cobbs and the 
Pinkneys. But the specter rose like Banquo's ghost and would 
not down. Occasional petitions for the abolition of slavery 
in the national District of Columbia had been sent to Congress 
by Quakers and abolitionists, but they had been referred to the 
little committee on the District and allowed to slumber. With 
the opening of the session of 1835, however, in which the new 
Whig congressmen were first represented, some of the Northern 
members began to debate the question. Slade of Vermont 
moved that an abolitionist petition be printed^ and when the 
Southerners vehemently protested and called on Congress to 
disclaim the power of interfering with slavery in the District, 
Slade took up the challenge and delivered a fiery speech which 
revived the passions of 1820. He insisted that Congress had 



^^THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 



389 



full power over slavery in the national territory, and proceeded 
further to ^'declare relentless war" against the institution. 
Southern members, like Hammond, Jones, and Wise, interposed 
anxious remonstrances, and Calhoun in the Senate called the 
petitions ^^a foul slander on nearly one half the states of the 
Union." The mischief was afoot. 

Meanwhile the activity of the abolitionist societies was pro- 
voking hostile reaction all through the South. The new Amer- 
ican society collected $30,000 for propaganda, flooding the 
states below Mason and Dixon's line with magazines, pamph- 
lets, and tracts — Human Rights," The Anti-slavery Record, 
The Emancipator, ^^The Slave's Friend," and the like. On a 
midsummer night of 1835 citizens of Charleston broke into the 
post office, seized bundles of the offensive papers, and burned 
them on the Parade Ground amid the plaudits of a large and 
excited crowd. The postmaster at Charleston wrote to the 
postmaster at New York, whence the abolitionist material had 
come, begging him not to allow any more such documents to be 
forwarded to South Carolina ; and the postmaster at New York 
reported the matter to the newly appointed Postmaster-General, 
Amos Kendall. Kendall's reply was equivocal: He could not 
exclude the abolitionist material from the mails, but he ap- 
proved his subordinate's refusal to deliver it. ^^We owe an 
obligation to the laws," he wrote to the postmaster at Charles- 
ton, ^^but a higher one to the community in which we live." 
When Jackson upheld this extraordinary conduct in his cabinet 
officer, he incurred the condemnation of thousands in the North 
who had little sympathy with abolition. If the interests of 
slavery demanded the infraction of the law, they argued, it 
was time that those interests be curbed. 

The agitation over the petitions to Congress tended to the 
same result. So long as the petitions were received and referred 
to the proper committee they were left to oblivion. But when 
the Speaker of the House, James K. Polk of Tennessee, yielding 
to the general indignation of the Southern members, ruled that 
the constitutional right of petition did not oblige the House 
to receive a petition, he made the grave mistake of transferring 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the question from the merits of abolition to the constitutional 
rights of American citizens. John Quincy Adams, who had 
shown no leanings toward the abolitionist cause, now took up 
the fight in behalf of the right of petition. A battle royal was 
waged on the floor of Congress during the spring months of 
1836, resulting in the adoption of a set of resolutions introduced 
by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, to the effect that Con- 
gress could not interfere with slavery in the states and should 
not interfere with it in the District of Columbia ; that it was 
"important and desirable that the agitation on this subject be 
finally arrested"; and that "all petitions, memorials, proposi- 
tions, or papers relating in any way to the subject of slavery 
. . . shall, without being printed or referred, be laid on the 
table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon." 
When the roll was called on this last resolution (the "Gag- 
rule"), John Quincy Adams answered, "I hold the resolution 
to be a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, 
the rules of this House, and the rights of my constituents." 
From that moment the ablest statesman of the House of 
Representatives fought the battle of the abolitionists. 

Professor Burgess, in his "Middle Period" of American his- 
tory (p. 274), declares that "it would not be extravagant to 
say that the whole course of the internal history of the United 
States from 1836 to 1861 was determined more largely by the 
struggle in Congress over the abolitionist petitions and the use 
of the mails for the distribution of abolitionist literature than 
by anything else." That struggle welded the abolitionists into 
a political party^ whose influence increased steadily in the 
national elections from 1840 on, and whose principles, in modi- 
fied form, triumphed in the election of Abraham Lincoln 
twenty years later. It convinced the South that the abolition- 
ists were bent on carrying the war against slavery into the states 
below Mason and Dixon's line, and led those states to guard 
their society against possible black insurrections by passing 
severe laws against the assembling of negroes, their carrying of 
arms, their learning to read and write, or their having in their 
possession any abolitionist literature. It convinced the South- 



"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 391 



ern leaders of the prime necessity of preserving their power in 
Congress by keeping the number of slave states at least equal 
to the number of free commonwealths ; whence their desire for 
the annexation of new lands suitable for the extension of slave 
labor (Texas and Cuba) and their insistence that the great 
trans-Mississippi territory be kept free from antislavery restric- 
tions. Finally, the attack of the abolitionists on slavery as a 
m.oral evil developed pari passu a defense of the institution as 
a useful social arrangement and a positive material and moral 
blessing for the negro. All the scruples of a Jefferson, a Ran- 
dolph, or a Washington on the justice or humanity of the slave 
system were hushed, and a new generation was trained by the 
apologetics of Thomas Dew,^ Calhoun, Hammond, and Wise to 
believe that the institution which they were eventually to defend 
in arms was indispensable to their civilization and sanctioned 
by the laws of God. 

In spite of the abolitionist agitation, labor unrest, and grow- 
ing political opposition, the country seemed to be extremely 
prosperous as Jackson's term approached its close. The na- 
tional debt was completely extinguished at the beginning of the 
year 1835. The revenues from the compromise tariff of 1833 
were ample. The sale of public lands, encouraged by the low 
government price of $1.25 an acre, with easy extension of credit 
and abundant issues of notes by the state banks, and stimulated 
by hopes of rapid development and huge profits in the exploi- 
tation of railroads and canals, rose from $4,887,000 in 1834 to 
$14,757,000 in 1835 and over $24,000,000 in 1836. At the 
opening of the last-named year the balance in the Treasury 
exceeded $32,000,000. There seemed to be no way of stopping 
the income, for the tariff was fixed by the compromise for half 

1 Thomas R. Dew, a professor of politics in William and Mary College, was 
the first to announce clearly the new spirit of the South. In 1832, as a result of 
Nat Turner's negro insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, he published 
a treatise in which he maintained that the doctrine of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence that all men are born "free and equal" was false, that the social and 
economic interests of the state of Virginia demanded that the negro be kept in 
bondage, and that such a condition was a blessing to the slaves themselves. His 
book was very influential in the South. 



392 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



a dozen years to come, and the price of public lands could not 
be further lowered without prejudice to those who had already 
bought. Various schemes for the disposal of the surplus were 
brought forward,^ and in the end Clay's long-cherished project 
of a distribution of the surplus among the states in the ratio of 
their population was passed by Congress and signed by Jackson 
on June 23,1836. Under the Distribution Act about 1 1 8,000,000 
was deposited with the states before the panic of 1837 came to 
change the surplus into a deficit. 

The American people were living in a fool's paradise in the 
middle thirties, building air castles of fortune overnight.. Land 
values were immensely inflated ; hundreds of banks recklessly 
chartered by state legislatures were flooding the country with 
their unsecured notes. The states (especially the newer states 
of the West) were vying with one another in grandiose schemes 
for canals, railroads, and land improvements, incurring huge 
debts for public works which they fatuously believed would 
free them, with the rush of population, from the burdens of 
taxation. Indiana, still hardly more than a frontier commun- 
ity with less than half a million people, planned to expend 
$20,000,000 in the construction of canals and roads. Illinois, 
with a debt already on her hands and the state revenues still 
unequal to paying current expenses, rolled up a further debt of 
S3 5 a head for her population of 400,000 and threw good money 
after bad by sinking her whole allotment of the federal surplus 
in wild schemes of internal improvement. 

The first shock to this fictitious prosperity came from Pres- 
ident Jackson. On July 11, 1836, he ordered the Secretary of 
the Treasury to publish the Specie Circular, forbidding the land 

^The most interesting of these propositions, in view of the future development 
of industry, was made by Felix Grundy of Tennessee, at the suggestion of Presi- 
dent Jackson himself ; namely, that the surplus be used to buy the ''freedom of 
the railroads." As roads or sections of roads were completed, a sum fixed by law 
should be paid them by the government, in return for which the roads were to 
transport mail, troops, and property of the government free of charge. Such an 
arrangement would have been a long step in the direction of government owner- 
ship. The contract was to be perpetual, and the payments were to constitute a 
lien on the property and land of the roads. 



THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 393 



agents and the deposit banks to receive anything but gold and 
silver after August 1 5 in payment for the sales of public land. 
Thus by a stroke of the pen the government deprived of their 
validity as national currency that vast mass of state bank notes 
which the deposit banks had been freely receiving in payment 
for public lands and reissuing as loans for the purchase of more 
lands — an endless chain. The deposit banks of the West began 
to call desperately on the East for specie to meet their obliga- 
tions to the government, and at the same time shut down 
rigorously on their loans. The land sales virtually ceased. The 
^Vildcat banks/' without specie to redeem their discredited 
notes, collapsed. 

Had the Specie Circular been issued six months earlier, the 
panic which followed would probably have come in time to sweep 
the administration out of office. But the campaign of 1836 
was already far advanced, and the election took place before 
the effects of Jackson's fateful circular were fully felt. The 
National Democratic Convention, which met at Baltimore in 
May, had unanimously indorsed Jackson's candidate, Van 
Buren. The Whigs, not yet amalgamated into a party, held no 
convention and published no platform. They depended on the 
combination of votes given to various anti- Jackson candidates 
(Daniel Webster in New England, Hugh L. White in the South 
and Southwest, William H. Harrison in the Middle and Western 
States) to prevent Van Buren from getting a majority in the 
Electoral College, thus throwing the election into the House of 
Representatives. But although Van Buren had little to recom- 
mend him for the first office in the land, the influence of his 
great chief was powerful enough to carry him to victory, with 
170 electoral votes against 124 for all his opponents combined. 
His popular majority, however, was but 25,000, as compared 
with Jackson's 157,000 in 1832.^ After enjoying the peculiar 
satisfaction on inauguration day of seeing Van Buren, whom the 

^Jackson's candidate for the vice presidency, Richard M. Johnson of Ken- 
tucky, failed by a single vote of getting a majority in the Electoral College. For 
the first and only time in our history the choice of a vice president then devolved, 
upon the Senate, which immediately elected Johnson. 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Senate had refused to confirm as minister to England, sworn 
into the presidency by Chief Justice Taney, whom the Senate 
had refused to confirm as Secretary of the Treasury, Jackson 
issued a farewell address to the people of America and departed 
from Washington for his plantation in Tennessee, leaving Van 
Buren pledged to ^'follow in the footsteps of my illustrious 
predecessor," but destined to walk a path strewn with thorns. 

The new president was hardly installed in office before the 
country was in the throes of the worst panic in its history — 
the inevitable nemesis of overspeculation, inflation, reckless 
banking, and frenzied schemes of canal and railroad develop- 
ment. One misfortune pressed upon another's heels. A busi- 
ness depression in England cut down our exports sharply. 
The price of cotton feU from twenty to ten cents a pound, 
forcing some of our largest planters into bankruptcy. The 
British capitalists who had invested generously in American 
securities in the hour of our seeming great prosperity called on 
our banks for money just at the moment when they were beset 
with importunities for specie to satisfy the demands of Jack- 
son's Circular and crippled by the withdrawal of government 
funds to pay the first installment of the distribution of the sur- 
plus. The strain was too great. In May the banks of New 
York suspended specie payment, and by the end of the summer 
there was not a single bank in the United States that met its 
obligations in gold and silver. Specie was hoarded. Interest 
rates rose to 3 per cent a month. Building-operations, indus- 
trial expansion^ improvement schemes, — in short, every activity 
that depended on the extension of credit, — ceased. Thousands 
of men were thrown out of employment. By September, 1837, 
nine tenths of the factories of the Eastern states were closed. 
The cruelty of nature was added to the folly of man to make 
the disaster complete. In the summer and autumn of 1836 the 
Hessian fly ravaged the wheat fields of Pennsylvania, Delaware, 
Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The citizens of Louisville 
declared in a memorial to the Senate that their prosperity was 
"as completely marred as if a large invading army had passed 
through their country." Flour rose to $12 a barrel. The scanty 



^'THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON'* 395 



wages of the masses of laborers in our great cities were literally 
insufficient to buy them bread. The walls of New York were 
placarded with angry handbills: Bread, Meat, Rent, Fuel — 
the prices must come down ! " Starving mobs broke into the 
warehouses where the precious flour was stored and threw the 
barrels into the street. 

The panic, of course, was not due to any one man or measure. 
However, the people at large, incompetent and impatient to seek 
the underlying causes of economic distress, threw the blame on 
Van Buren. And the Whigs were quick to exploit the misfortune 
for the discredit of the Democratic administration : the trouble 
was all due to Jackson's crimes and blunders — his defeat of 
the Bank charter, his removal of the deposits, his crusade 
against paper money, his Specie Circular. In the widespread 
popular distress the Whigs had their best campaign material. 
They carried several important states in the elections of 1838, 
including New York, where the brilliant young William H. 
Seward won the governorship over Marcy and the ^'Albany 
Regency." 

Meanwhile Van Buren had called Congress in extra session 
for the first Monday in September, 1837, to relieve the embar- 
rassed condition of the Treasury and restore financial con- 
fidence in the country. The distribution of the installment of 
the surplus due in October was postponed until 1839.^ Treas- 
ury notes to the amount of $10,000,000 were issued to meet 
the government expenses. The Whigs demanded the reestablish- 
ment of the National Bank and the repeal of the Specie Cir- 
cular, but Van Buren remained firm in his adhesion to Jackson's 
policies. The scheme of depositing the government balances in 
the ^'pet banks" having signally failed, the President devised 
a new plan, which divorced the government finances completely 
from any banking system. This was the Independent Treasury, 
commonly called the Subtreasury, plan, by which the public 

iWhen the year 1839 arrived, the government had a deficit and not a surplus; 
so the Distribution Bill lapsed, after about $28,000,000 had been deposited with 
the states. The money was never recalled, although it continued to stand on 
the Treasury books as funds of the United States. 



396 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



funds were to remain in the hands of government custodians — 
postmasters, directors of mints, collectors of customs — until 
called for. Van Buren labored for two years with refractory 
elements in Congress to get the Independent Treasury bill 
passed. The Whigs, who saw in it the doom of their hopes for 
a National Bank, and conservative Eastern Democrats, who be- 
lieved that the government should help the banks out of their 
difficulty instead of abandoning them in the hour of their need, 
combined to block the measure in the House. On the other 
hand, Calhoun, to the amazement of his colleagues in the 
Senate, brought the immense weight of his influence in the South 
to the support of the administration (expecting in return Van 
Buren 's favor for the annexation of slave territory in Texas). 
Jackson wrote an open letter from the Hermitage commending 
the new plan. The bill was finally passed, June 30, 1840. It 
provided for the establishment of subtreasuries in important 
cities of the country (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, St. 
Louis, New Orleans), where the public moneys were to be kept 
in vaults.^ 

The financial situation was the absorbing question of Van 
Buren's term. It furnished the Whigs the chief rallying point 
for opposition to the administration and for the consolidation 
of their party. Still, there were other subjects of importance 
with which Van Buren had to deal. In November, 1837, 
a serious revolt against English rule broke out in Canada. 
The insurgents appealed to the Americans along the border 
to help them, holding out offers of annexation to the United 
States if the revolution proved successful. The memory of 
our two wars with England had left a heritage of hostility 
toward the mother country," which was increased by the 
large Irish immigration. Meetings were held in Burlington, 
St. Albans, Rochester, Buffalo, and many other towns in 

^The momentary triumph of the Whigs in the election of 1840 led to the re- 
peal of the Independent Treasury Act; but it was repassed in 1846, after the 
Democrats had regained control, and it remained in force until the Civil War, 
when our government, under the stress of enormous expenses, was obliged again 
to have recourse to the powerful banking interests of the country. 



^'THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON 



397 



Vermont and New York, at which resolutions of sympathy with 
the insurgents were adopted, money was raised, and food, cloth- 
ing and ammunition were collected. Volunteer companies even 
were enlisted. Van Buren's Secretary of State, John Forsythe, 
warned the governors of the two border states to enforce 
a strict neutrality, but the recruiting still went on. Several 
hundred Americans joined the banners of the rebel leader 
Mackenzie at Navy Island in the Niagara River. A small 
American vessel, the Caroline, was used to transport men and 
supplies to the insurgents. In the darkness of the night of 
December 29, 1837, a detachment of English soldiers rowed to 
the Caroline as she was moored to her dock on the American 
side of the river, drove the men off her decks, with several killed 
and wounded, and sent her drifting ablaze over the falls. The 
whole border was instantly roused to reprisals. Expeditions 
for the invasion of Canada were launched from Detroit and 
Ogdensburg. The President sent General Scott to the scene of 
the disorders, with a message to the governors of Vermont and 
New York to call out the militia, both to restrain the hot-heads 
and to protect American soil. The excitement died down with 
the defeat of the insurgents. Conciliatory diplomacy prevented 
a breach with England. But the enemies of Van Buren charged 
him with cowardice and truckling to Great Britain in allowing 
the '^murder" of American citizens on American soil. 

During the whole of the administration. Congress and the 
country were increasingly disturbed by the abolitionist agi- 
tation. The President had declared himself in his inaugural 
address ^Hhe inflexible and uncompromising opponent of ev- 
ery attempt in Congress to abolish slavery in the District of 
Columbia against the wishes of the slaveholding states." But 
all to no avail. Petitions were multiplied, the gag-rule was 
reenacted, John Quincy Adams repeated his defiance, the de- 
bates in the House and Senate grew angrier. Lawless bands 
sacked and burned negro quarters in the cities, lynchings in- 
creased, and Elijah Lovejoy was shot down in Alton, Illinois, 
while defending his abolitionist press against the rioters. The 
movement for the annexation of Texas (which we shall study ia 



398 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the next chapter) gave a great impetus to the aboHtionist cause. 
Resolutions against annexation were passed by the legislatures 
of state after state in the North. The antislavery congressmen 
made the issue the topic for scathing denunciations of the 
institution, which provoked angry replies from the South. 

Abolitionism was no doctrine of the Whigs. Clay and Webster 
professed as much horror of it as Calhoun and Benton. Yet 
there is no doubt that the antislavery sentiment in the North, 
of which abolitionism was the militant advance guard, found 
a growing measure of sympathy in the Whig party. The Demo- 
crats, especially after Calhoun came to the support of the ad- 
ministration, tended more and more to become the party of 
the South. It took several years, to be sure, for the demands 
of the slave interests to wear down all other issues in the South 
and eliminate the Whig party there, but the tendency is already 
to be detected in the slavery debates of Van Buren's Congresses. 
One has only to compare the resolutions offered in the Senate 
by Calhoun and Clay on the subject of the petitions in 1837. 
Calhoun declared that the fanaticism of the North must be 
crushed ^Vithout temporizing or conciliation," else it would 
destroy the Union. Domestic slavery was an institution of the 
South, recognized by the Constitution, and ^^no change of feel- 
ing on the part of the other states could justify them or their 
citizens in open and systematic attacks thereon with a view to 
its overthrow, or in denying to the South the advantage which 
would accrue to her from the annexation of new states or ter- 
ritory on the ground that the institution of slavery which 
would be extended into them was sinful or immoral." Clay, on 
the other hand, professed that he had no such gloomy fears for 
the endurance of the Union. The best way to check the fa- 
naticism of the abolitionists was to continue to receive their 
petitions and refer them to the proper committee, where they 
would die a natural death. Clay offered counter resolutions 
to Calhoun's, condemning interference with slavery, but still 
pledging the Senate "to receive and respectfully treat any 
petitions, couched in decorous language, presented by citizens 
of the United States, touching slavery in the District of 



THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 399 



Columbia." As to the territory of Florida (the only one in 
which slavery existed at the time), he regarded the abolition of 
slavery there as ^^highly inexpedient/' because, among other 
reasons, ^Hhe people of the territory had not asked for abolition," 
and, when the territory should be admitted as a state into the 
Union, ^^the people would be entitled to decide that question for 
themselves." Clay did not refer to Texas in his resolutions. As 
between the militant and uncompromising language of Calhoun 
and the provisos and loopholes in Clay's resolutions, it is not 
hard to see where the antislavery men would find the more 
comfort. 

The chief point on which the Whig leaders waged their four 
years' campaign against the Jackson-Van Buren Democracy 
was the financial and industrial disorder which they claimed 
had been brought upon the country by the incompetency and 
arrogance of the administration. Adams protested against the 
"crimes" of ignorant and corrupt officials in all departments 
of the government; Webster thundered against the cowardice 
and demagogism of the party in power, in abandoning the solid 
business and banking interests of the country ; Clay toured the 
Eastern states, thanking God that he "had been spared to help 
in undoing the work of Andrew Jackson." A national Whig 
convention met at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, early in December, 
1839. Henry Clay was by far the most prominent man in the 
party, its founder and creator. He was also the personal choice 
of the great majority of the delegates. But Clay was a Free- 
mason, a slaveholder, and a high protectionist. On each of these 
counts he would have lost votes. His very prominence was a 
bar to his availability. Former Jackson men might be de- 
tached from Van Buren, but they would never support the old 
hero's archenemy. To Clay's bitter disappointment, and some- 
what to his disgust, the convention nominated William H. Har- 
rison, the hero of Tippecanoe, who had polled 73 votes in the 
election of 1836 and could show a creditable record of nearly 
fifty years of public service as a soldier on the northwest border, 
governor of the Northwest Territory, representative and senator 
in the national Congress, and our first minister to the Republic 



400 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



of Colombia. John Tyler of Virginia was named for vice pres- 
ident, simply to gain votes for the ticket in the South — for 
Tyler was a states'-rights man, an anti-Bank man, and a low- 
tariff man, whose only bond of sympathy with the Whigs was 
hatred for Andrew Jackson. The convention published no plat- 
form, for the heterogeneous elements composing the party could 
unite on no common purpose beyond the cry, ^'Down with Van 
Buren ! " Harrison was known, however, to be a believer in 
banks, a credit system, paper currency, and reform of the civil 
service. Campaign orators like Clay, Webster, Corwin, Crit- 
tenden, Wise, and Prentiss gave the voters of the different sec- 
tions of the country to understand that if the Whig party should 
be successful at the polls it would mean the satisfaction of 
the particular interests and desires of the audience they were 
addressing. 

A friend of Clay's was overheard by the correspondent of a 
Democratic paper in Baltimore to express his disappointment 
at Harrison's nomination by the sneer: ^^Give him a barrel of 
hard cider, settle a pension of $2000 a year on him, and, my 
word for it, he will sit for the remainder of his days in his 
log cabin by the side of a sea-coal fire, studying moral philoso- 
phy." The paper published the remark as a campaign document 
against the Whigs, but it proved to be a boomerang. The WTiigs 
seized upon this testimony to the simple tastes and virtuous 
poverty of their candidate (though, as a matter of fact, Har- 
rison lived in very comfortable circumstances on a 2000-acre 
farm on the banks of the Ohio). They adopted the log cabin 
and cider barrel as emblems of the campaign. Their candidate 
was the unspoiled son of the soil, the Cincinnatus who had left 
his plow to take the sword and had laid down the victorious 
sword to take the plow again. He represented the homely 
republican virtues of a true American, while Van Buren, in- 
stalled in his luxurious ^'bachelor" quarters in the White House, 
ate his dainty French fare off golden plates and drank costly 
wines out of silver goblets, callous to the sufferings which his 
ignorance and the corruption of his officials were bringing on 
the country. 



^'THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 401 



The Whig campaign was a continuous festival of oratory ^ 
pageant, song, and shouting, in which the sober remonstrances 
of the Democrats and their appeals to argue the merits of the 
Bank, the currency, states' rights, and taxation were drowned. 
Log cabins were erected for Whig headquarters, with the coon- 
skin nailed to the wall and the latchstring hung out. Mass meet- 
ings were gathered around the cider barrel. Huge balls were 
rolled through the streets from town to town by hundreds of 
men and boys shouting the songs of Tippecanoe and Tyler 
too" and ^^Van, Van, is a used-up man." Never before nor since 
was there such a campaign of vociferation. The Democrats, as 
one of their papers scornfully remarked, ^'were sung down, lied 
down, drunk down." Nearly double the number of the voters 
of the previous election were brought out to the polls, and, 
when the balloting was over, Harrison had carried all but seven 
states of the Union. His electoral vote was 234 to 60 for Van 
Buren. The Whigs got control of both Houses of Congress. 
In the excitement of the campaign the appearance of a new 
political party, which polled 7000 votes, passed almost unno- 
ticed. But the Liberty party, which was quietly launched by 
delegates from six states meeting at Albany on the first of April, 
1840, was destined to grow through a score of years into the 
mighty force which shattered the Whig party into fragments 
and sent the Democrats down to a long defeat. 

The Whig triumph of 1840 marks the end of the Jacksonian 
era. That era had been ushered in by the overwhelming victory 
of a soldier hero, a representative of the great new West, stand- 
ing as the champion of the people against the usurpation of their 
power by an aristocratic government at Washington indifferent 
to their needs and impervious to their demands. It was ended 
by exactly another such victory. And had the Whigs been 
destined to enjoy a dozen years of unbroken supremacy, it is 
likely that they too would have been confronted at the end of 
that period by a new and clamorous ^^democratic" movement 
protesting against the stagnation and corruption of our govern- 
ment. For it is in the nature of a young and vigorous de- 
mocracy to engender demands for the reform and readjustment 



402 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

of governmental machinery more rapidly than any actually 
working machinery can meet those demands. The Jacksonian 
era, roughly corresponding to the fourth decade of the last cen- 
tury, was perhaps the period of all our history most fruitful in 
democratic innovations, with its enlargement of the suffrage, its 
extension of elective offices^ its revised state constitutions, 
its national nominating conventions, its organization of labor, 
its popular discussion — on the lyceum platform, in the pulpit, 
and especially in the multiplying sheets of a cheap press — of 
such burning issues of the day as abolition, immigration, the 
annexation of Texas, and the settlement of Oregon. It was the 
era of the introduction of steam locomotion and of humanitarian 
reform in debtors' laws and the keeping of jails and asylums, in 
the curricula of the schools, in the encouragement of temper- 
ance, and in a hundred other matters to which economic and 
social histories of the period would give a more extended notice 
than is possible for this more strictly poHtical narrative to do. 

Andrew Jackson incarnated the spirit of the new democracy. 
He personified and dominated the developing political forces 
of the fourth decade of the century, as Thomas Jefferson had 
dominated and personified those of the first decade. Paradox- 
ical as it may seem, it is nevertheless true that Jackson him- 
self contributed more than any other man to the overthrow of 
the Jacksonian democracy. For he taught the masses of the 
people to hold their governors subject to their will, and educated 
them to view as reactionary any regime that tended to separate 
itself from the censure of public opinion or paused in the culti- 
vation of popular approbation. He saw the Whig leaders seize 
the very weapons in their campaign against Van Buren which he 
himself had used in his campaign against John Quincy Adams a 
dozen years earlier. The rolling log cabins and the cider barrels, 
the mass meetings and the boisterous songs, must have been 
pathetically reminiscent of hickory poles and stamped waist- 
coats and huzzas for New Orleans and Pensacola to the old hero, 
now well past his threescore and ten years, who was following 
the fortunes of his party with undiminished interest from his 
retreat at the Hermitage. 



CHAPTER VIII 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 

Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America north 
and south is to be peopled. — Thomas Jeiterson 

Tyler and Texas 

The rejoicing of the Whigs was soon turned to mourning. 
Five weeks after the old hero of Tippecanoe had spoken his 
inaugural address before the enthusiastic crowd gathered at the 
eastern front of the Capitol, his body was lying in state beneath 
its majestic dome. How far Harrison would have succeeded, 
had he lived, in controlling and guiding the Whigs is a matter 
of conjecture. He was not, hke Jackson in 1828 and Jefferson 
in 1800, the acknowledged leader and builder of the party which 
had won the nation's indorsement at the polls. Both Clay and 
Webster towered far above him, and although they yielded him 
the place at the head of the ticket as the most ^'available" 
candidate, they made slight concealment of their opinion of his 
mediocrity." They meant to use the old general as the im- 
posing figurehead at the bow of the ship of state, while they 
themselves manned the bridge and piped the crew. Clay de- 
clined a place in the cabinet, preferring to direct the adminis- 
tration from his seat in the Senate; but a full half of the 
cabinet offices were filled with men of his recommendation — 
Ewing (Treasury), Badger (Navy), and Crittenden (Attorney- 
General). Webster, given the choice of positions after Clay's 
declination, took the portfolio of State, and brought his follower 
Francis Granger into the cabinet as Postmaster-General. The 
President appears to have been allowed to select his Secretary 
of War (James K. Bell) without the interference of the giants. 
Clay had decided in party caucus some time before the inaugu- 
ration that the new Whig Congress must be called in extra 

403 



404 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



session to bring the blessings of the victory of 1840 to the 
country without delay, and Harrison had duly issued the call 
for the session to meet on May 31, 1841. The Whig leaders 
had refused to let Harrison open his mouth as candidate. They 
would now run the government for him, as they had run 
the campaign — successfully, if he would only remain in the 
background. 

Harrison's death in no wise changed the plans of the Whig 
leaders, nor did the accession of Vice President Tyler seem at 
first to bode any ill to those plans. In an address to the people, 
published immediately after Harrison's funeral, Tyler spoke 
hopefully of the reforms to be introduced and modestly of his 
own readiness to follow Congress in any constitutional measures. 
His message at the opening of the extra session of Congress 
(June i) was almost deferential in its recognition of the right 
of the representatives fresh from their constituents to inaugu- 
rate the needed reforms for the relief of the Treasury and the 
improvement of the currency. His remarks on ^'a necessary 
financial agent" for dealing with the public funds were inter- 
preted by Benton as so unmistakably a recommendation for the 
reestablishment of the National Bank that the old Jackso- 
nian forthwith began an attack on the President in the Senate. 
''The people, simple folk," says Schouler, imagined that Tyler 
would follow Harrison's plans with the same sad reverence with 
which he had followed his hearse." 

The plans, however, were not Harrison's but Clay's. On 
June 7 Clay introduced into the Senate an elaborate program 
consisting of six resolutions, which were nothing less than the 
whole plan and policy of the Whig administration. They were 
in reality the platform of the party, which the leaders had not 
dared to publish before the election, but which they expected 
now, with their president in the White House and with a 
majority in both branches of Congress, to pass without diffi- 
culty. That it was the president's constitutional privilege to 
recommend legislation to Congress seems not to have troubled 
the senator from Kentucky. What the president's part was to 
be in this administration we have already seen. The days of 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 405 



executive domination were over. The good old Whig doctrine 
of the rule of the enhghtened aristocracy was to take the place 
of the Jacksonian demagogism of ^'Democracy," which af- 
fected to rest its absolute and arbitrary acts on the will of the 
whole people. 

Clay's resolutions contained three main projects: first, the 
reestablishment of a National Bank, with the preliminary step 
of the abolition of the Independent Treasury system ; secondly, 
the revision of the tariff to yield an adequate revenue; and, 
thirdly, the allotment to the several states of the proceeds of the 
sale of the public lands within their borders. These resolutions 
were virtually the revival of the old National Republican policy 
of the Adams-Clay days; namely, National Bank, protective 
tariff, and internal improvements. It is true that the last two 
objects were not mentioned in Clay's resolutions, but one can 
see how skillfully they are included in his demands. For if the 
tariff were raised high enough to provide an ^'adequate revenue" 
at the same time that the only other great item of revenue, the 
public-lands sales, was made over to the states, then the tariff 
would be high enough to be protective. And if the government 
gave the states the proceeds of the public-lands sales to spend 
on their own internal improvements, it would come to the same 
thing as the government's spending the money itself. In either 
case it would be national money devoted to local improvements. 

At first all went well. The bill for the abolition of the 
Independent Treasury was passed and promptly signed by the 
President. Then came the crucial measure of the Congress — 
the reestablishment of the Bank. It was known that Tyler 
was a strong states'-rights man and that some care would have 
to be taken to draft a bill which would meet with his approval. 
The point on which Tyler was insistent was the necessity of 
gaining the consent of the states for establishing branches 
within their borders. The House was apparently willing to 
yield this point, but Clay swept it aside in the Senate. A 
National Bank would not be ^'national," he maintained, if it 
had to ask the consent of the states anywhere to do business. 
The question of its constitutionality had been settled once for 



4o6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

all by Marshall's great decision, and the people had reversed 
their condemnation of the Bank in the election of 1832 by this 
new election of 1840. John Tyler could do no better than fol- 
low his illustrious fellow Virginian, James Madison, whom he 
professed to reverence, and sign the bill for the Bank's charter. 
The utmost that Clay would concede was the power of a state to 
prevent the establishment of a branch by an express act of its 
legislature. 

The Bank bill was passed by votes of 128 to 97 in the House 
and 26 to 23 in the Senate and was sent to the President on 
August 6. Tyler kept the bill until the last moment of the ten 
days allowed him for deliberation, and then returned it with his 
veto. The narrowness of the Whig majority in the Senate made 
the passage of the bill over his veto impossible. Another at- 
tempt was made to frame a bill which would meet with the 
executive's approval. Two leading Whig congressmen conferred 
with Secretaries Webster and Ewing in preparing the new bill, 
which, according to Swing's testimony, fulfilled the conditions 
which Tyler demanded. Even the name ^^Bank" was not used. 
The new institution was to be called a fiscal corporation," and 
the ^^agencies" (not ^'branches") in the states were to be de- 
prived of their banking-functions of loan and discount. Yet to 
the amazement and disgust of the Whig leaders Tyler vetoed 
this second bill also (September 9). 

It was evident that Tyler would have no National Bank of 
any kind. At Clay's behest Crittenden, Ewing, Badger, and Bell 
immediately resigned from the cabinet, and Granger soon fol- 
lowed, leaving only Daniel Webster of the original Harrison 
appointees. The extra session, which had begun with such prom- 
ise in June, ended disastrously in September. The chief measure 
of the Whigs had been defeated by this "president by acci- 
dent," this Virginian of states'-rights convictions, whom they 
had had no more intention of putting in the White House than 
they had of putting on the throne of China. The breach be- 
tween the executive and Congress was complete, and Tyler con- 
trolled the situation through the veto which the Whigs had not 
enough majority to override. With exasperating equanimity 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 



Tyler proceeded to fill up his cabinet (not with Clay men this 
time) and was ready for the resumption of hostilities at the 
opening of the regular session of Congress. The country was 
sadly in need of revenue — the issue of several millions of short- 
time notes had been necessary to meet the bare expenses of 
government. The sudden reduction of the tariff which would 
come on January i, 1842, according to the scale arranged by 
the compromise of 1833, would leave the country facing a huge 
deficit. Those reductions had been arranged nearly a decade 
back and had failed to take account of the growth of the coun- 
try and the consequent increase in the expenses of the govern- 
ment. Tyler urged Congress to make the necessary provision 
by increasing the tariff rates, but he refused to sign any bill that 
did not provide for the stoppage of the distribution of the sales 
from the public lands as soon as the tariff should have passed 
the 20 per cent mark. In other words, he would not allow the 
tariff to provide a surplus for internal improvement. As the 
tariff did not drop below 20 per cent at all, Clay's pet scheme 
was killed. 

The Whigs had no alternative but to adopt the kind of tariff 
bill Tyler would sign or let the country suffer. After the Pres- 
ident had vetoed two tariff bills and drawn upon himself the 
threat of impeachment, the protesting members yielded to the 
crying need of the Treasury. On August 30, 1842, the House 
passed the bill containing the suspension of the distribution of 
the land sales. John Tyler had ruined the plans of the Whigs 
and brought the victory of 1840 to naught. He was read out of 
the Whig party as a ^'traitor" and burned in effigy by the crowds 
that had shouted themselves hoarse for him two years before. 
In a pathetic scene Henry Clay resigned his seat in the Senate 
(March 31), to devote himself, as his great rival Jackson had 
done eighteen years before, to saving among the people the 
principles which were defeated at the seat of government. 

Tyler has been severely censured by our historians generally 
for turning against a party which had elected him, and has been 
charged with the meanest of motives — vanity, jealousy, and 
spite. He was filled with ati oyerweening arnbitipn, say hi| 



4o8 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



critics, to displace Clay and Webster, over whom Harrison's 
providential removal had given him the whip hand, and, relying 
on a coterie of Virginia friends who "led him by the nose," to 
build up a Tyler party devoted to the restoration of Virginia's 
influence in our national councils and to the extension of slavery 
in the West. On the other hand, his son. Professor Lyon G. 
Tyler, produced in the "Letters and Times of the Tylers" (three 
volumes) an elaborate apology to prove that all the public acts 
of the President were prompted by the same lofty standards 
of gentlemanly honor that were acknowledged in his private 
life. Tyler was known to be a states'-rights man and an anti- 
Bank man. He was put on the Whig ticket with the hope (vain, 
as it proved) of carrying the state of Virginia. The Whig 
managers cared little about Tyler's views on the Bank, because 
they believed that as vice president he would have nothing to 
say about the Bank or, indeed, about any matter of public 
policy. As the \Miigs published no platform, their candidates 
w^re bound by no promises. Naturally, the support of the head 
of the ticket for the program of Cla\^ and Webster was guaran- 
teed, but was Tyler, "who cared for none of these things," 
bound to be converted to them by the mere fact of Harrison's 
death? A man cannot be a "traitor" to principles which he 
has never accepted nor an "apostate" to a creed which he has 
never professed. 

But to acquit Tyler of the charge of broken faith is by no 
means to excuse him for his vanity, sophistry, and obstinacy. 
After all, he allowed himself to be put forward on the Whig 
ticket, knowing that, platform or no platform, the party led by 
Henry Clay, if successful, would renew the nationalist doctrines 
of 1824. If his conscience would not let him sign the Bank bill, 
even after it had been so amended as to lead several members 
of his cabinet to give their written testimony that it was satisfac- 
tory to him, he need not for that have WTecked the party. By 
holding either of the bills for ten days he could have let it be- 
come law w^ithout his signature, deferring to the Whig majority 
in Congress. No man had more bitterly attacked Andrew Jack- 
son's executive tyranny in the veto of bills, and yet he followed 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 



409 



in Jackson's footsteps. Clay's keen probe went probably to the 
right spot when he accused Tyler of listening to the flattery 
of his corporal's guard" of Virginia friends (Wise, Gilmer, 
Upshur, Tucker, Rives), who encouraged him in the belief that 
he was a national leader when they were really using him only 
as a sectional agent for the furtherance of states' rights and 
slavery. Even the voluminous work of filial piety undertaken 
by his son fails to show the President as more than an average 
gentleman of fine breeding, with something of the pertinacity 
and cunning of the politician in him but little of the strength 
and vision of the statesman. 

We have seen that Webster alone remained in Tyler's cabinet 
after the close of the extra session. Among the many motives 
that may have urged him to stay (ambition to retain office, 
belief that he could direct the policy of the administration, 
unwilHngness to be classed with Clay's ^'underlings") the 
Massachusetts statesman confessed only this: that there were 
important negotiations with Great Britain pending and that 
he could not desert the administration in such a crisis. This 
reason, if not exhaustive, was certainly sufficient. Our relations 
with England were strained almost to the breaking-point in 
1 84 1. British cruisers were stopping American ships off the 
coast of Africa and exercising the hated right of search to guard 
against the slave trade. The Caroline affair was not only not 
settled but it was greatly exaggerated by the threat of New York 
State to hang a certain Alexander McLeod, a British citizen who 
came across the border boasting that it was he who had killed 
the American on board the Caroline. The lumbermen of Maine 
and New Brunswick, disputing over the boundary line, had ac- 
tually precipitated a httle war (the Aroostook War), which had 
ended in a truce, leaving the boundary line still to be adjusted. 
In the Far Northwest the Oregon region, which had been shared 
in joint occupation by the United States and Great Britain 
according to the treaty of 181 8 (renewed in 1827), began now 
to be a bone of contention between the two powers. The English 
resented the growing interest of American explorers and mis- 
sionaries in the region, while the Americans complained of the 



410 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

steady encroachments of the Hudson's Bay Company on the 
southern portion of Oregon, the valley of the Columbia, which 
naturally formed the American ^'sphere of influence." 

The South had its grievance, too, against Great Britain. The 
brig Creole sailed from Hampton Roads to New Orleans in 
October, 1841, with a cargo of one hundred and thirty-eight 
slaves. The slaves mutinied, killed their owner, overpowered 
the captain and mate, and compelled the crew to land them on 
the British island of Nassau, where most of them were set at 
liberty by the authorities. Our government demanded their 
return, but the British maintained, in common with the hated 
abolitionists, that once outside the limits of the jurisdiction of 
a state whose municipal law sanctioned slavery the negroes were 
free men. Slavery had no international standing. 

Finally, a number of states, INIississippi in the lead, hard hit 
by the panic of Van Buren's administration, were actually re- 
pudiating or threatening to repudiate their debts incurred in the 
era of overspeculation which we have studied in connection with 
the Jacksonian period. English capitalists had invested heavily 
in these state securities and were now demanding that the na- 
tional government underwrite the state debts. ^ This accumula- 
tion of grievances at the beginning of Tyler's administration 
made peace with Great Britain more difficult to preserve than 
at any other time between the Treaty of Ghent and the famous 
Trent affair in our Civil War. A spirited report from the House 
Committee on Foreign Relations declared that we would main- 
tain our just rights in the face of any nation of the earth. Lewis 
Cass, our minister to France, wrote that the English colony in 
Paris was eager for war with the United States. Measures were 
actually taken by the British cabinet for the dispatch of regi- 
ments and warships to Halifax. 

At this juncture Daniel Webster performed a great service 
for his country. A fortunate change in Enghsh politics in 1841 
brought Robert Peel to the premiership in the place of Lord 

ijohn Quincy Adams advised that the federal government assume the repu- 
diated debt of Mississippi and eject the state from the Union. There were worse 
things for many a. Northern statesman in, 1840 than the disruption of the Union \ 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 41 1 



Melbourne, and Lord Aberdeen to the Foreign Office in the 
place of Lord Palmerston. Peel and Aberdeen were conciliatory. 
They sent to Washington, in the person of Lord Ashburton, a 
fair and courteous envoy, who knew and liked America. The 
negotiations between Webster and Ashburton in the summer 
of 1842 proceeded smoothly and rapidly, with the President's 
willing aid at every point. Although the Oregon question was 
not debated and the Creole case was postponed to drag its 
weary settlement through a decade, all the other points of dif- 
ficulty were solved. For the attack on the Caroline (McLeod 
being already acquitted) Webster accepted Ashburton's apology 
that "no slight to the authority of the United States was ever 
intended." The two nations agreed to a cruising-convention, by 
which each should keep its patrolling squadron on the African 
slave coast, to act together if occasion arose. The urgent ques- 
tion of the Maine-New Brunswick boundary was settled by a 
compromise line which gave about 7000 of the 12,000 square 
miles of disputed territory to the United States. Lord Ashbur- 
ton promised that there should be no "officious interference 
with American vessels driven by accident or violence" into the 
ports of the West Indies and took no exception to Webster's 
declaration that the flag of every regularly documented Amer- 
ican merchantman should protect its crew. No one of our 
former major treaties with Great Britain (1783, 1795, 1814) 
had cleared the air so thoroughly as the Webster-Ashburton 
Treaty.^ Had it not been for the insistent demands of the ex- 

lAn amusing incident of the treaty was the so-called "battle of the maps." 
Webster had in his possession a map discovered by Jared Sparks in the archives 
of the Department of Foreign Affairs at Paris, supposed to have been the one 
used by Franklin and Vergennes in the peace negotiations of 1782. On it a red 
line marked the boundary, giving to Canada an even larger share of the disputed 
territory than Great Britain claimed in 1842. Webster naturally did not exhibit 
the "red-lme map" in his parley with Ashburton, but used it secretly to per- 
suade Maine and Massachusetts of the excellence of the bargain he was making. 
On the other hand, Ashburton was probably acquainted with the Mitchell map, 
used in the negotiations of the British in 1783, on which the boundary line was 
as favorable to the United States as that of the "red-line map" was to Canada. 
So each commissioner could persuade himself that he was getting the better of 
the bargain. 



412 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



pansionists for Texas and Oregon, our troubles with the mother 
country would seem to have come to an end. 

The most absorbing issue of Tyler's administration, and one 
of the most fateful issues in all our history, was the annexation 
of Texas. Whatever claims we may have had to Texas as part of 
the Louisiana Purchase territory in 1803 were surrendered by 
the treaty of 18 19 with Spain, which fixed the southwestern 
boundary of the United States at the Sabine River. Two 3^ears 
later Mexico (of which Texas was a province) threw off its 
allegiance to Spain in the general revolt of the South and Central 
American colonies. The new republic of jMexico was at first 
very favorable to immigration from the United States into Texas 
and granted large tracts of land on easy terms. It even ex- 
cepted Texas from the operation of the decree of 1829, which 
abolished slavery in Mexico. But the very next year a sudden 
reversal of policy, which aimed at expelling the foreigners from 
Texas, led to an uprising in which the Americans joined the 
native Liberals" in ejecting the Mexican troops from the prov- 
ince. A wily adventurer named Santa Anna took advantage 
of the Liberal revolt to get control of the government in Mexico 
and then threw off his disguise and whipped the province with 
scorpions where his predecessors had used rods. Texas was 
deprived of her government and made a mere military depart- 
ment in the province of Coahuila. The inhabitants of Texas, 
of whom about 75 per cent were American immigrants, had no 
intention of yielding to such tyranny. They organized a tem- 
porary government, declared their independence of Mexico on 
March 2, 1836, and on April 21, under the command of Sam 
Houston of Tennessee, completely defeated the invading Mex- 
ican army at the battle of San Jacinto and took its general, 
Santa Anna, prisoner. The connection between Mexico and 
Texas was forever severed. 

Then began the campaign for the annexation of Texas to 
the United States, urged by Houston (who had been elected 
president of the Texan republic) and approved by the almost 
unanimous opinion of the citizens of Texas, but denounced by 
Mexico as a cause of war against the United States. For, in 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 



413 



spite of the fact that she was impotent to recover her authority 
over the revolted province, Mexico steadily refused to recognize 
the independence of Texas. President Jackson was heartily in 
favor of the annexation of Texas. He had made two attempts 
(1829, 1835) to purchase the province from Mexico, raising 
John Quincy Adams's offer of $1,000,000 in 1827 to $5,000,000 
and even urging, in the proposition of 1835, that Mexico relin- 
quish the land between the parallels of 37° and 42° north 
latitude from the Rio Grande to the Pacific.^ Furthermore, 
Jackson was little disturbed by delicate scruples in his methods 
of acquiring desirable territory for the United States, as had 
been proved by his conduct in Florida. But now, in spite of the 
overwhelming sentiment of the Texans in favor of annexation 
and in spite of the vote of both Houses of Congress to recognize 
the independence of Texas when she should have shown herself 
fit to maintain her government, Jackson hung back. The alleged 
reason was that the annexation of Texas would bring on a war 
with Mexico, but the fear of injuring the chances of his candi- 
date Van Buren in the approaching election may have been the 
more cogent reason. The abolitionist agitation over the rejec- 
tion of the antislavery petitions by Congress and the exclusion 
of the antislavery literature from the mails was at its height 
(p. 388). Van Buren needed the Northern votes to win, and 
until the election was over, Jackson confined himself to harmless 
negotiations with Mexico. In the spring of 1837, however, he 
recognized the independence of Texas and heightened his tone 
in dealing with Mexico. 

Van Buren, however, was little interested in expansion and 
not at all in slavery. He would have had no inclination to favor 
the annexation policy, even if the storm raised by the panic of 
1837 had not occupied the administration with financial prob- 
lems. Instead of listening to the overtures of the Texan envoy 

^It was asserted by Jackson's enemies that the failure of the proposition of 
1835 caused Jackson to give encouragement to Houston to secure the separation 
of Texas from Mexico by arms. There is some color given to the charge by the 
fact that Houston, after a visit to the White House, boasted that Texas would be 
independent and that he should be its first president. But this is slim evidence 
on which to condemn Jackson. 



414 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



at Washington, Van Buren preferred to negotiate a convention 
with Mexico for the settlement of our claims against her/ Inter- 
est in the annexation project waned both in the United States and 
in Texas. The activities of the American Antislavery Society, the 
insistence of the Northern press that we had ^Herritory enough, 
bad morals enough, public debt enough" already, the petitions 
to Congress (which were ^'measured by the cubic feet"), the 
three weeks' speech of John Quincy Adams against annexation 
(in the closing session of 1838), seemed to have put the quietus 
on the measure. The new president of Texas (Lamar) in his 
inaugural address of December, 1838, advocated a free and 
independent Texas. The British minister at Mexico City spoke 
of the annexation project as ^'dead." It was evident that the 
friends of annexation would have to wait until the wheel of 
political fortune brought round a favorable moment. 

That moment came in 1842. Tyler had dished the Whigs," 
and the Whigs had repudiated Tyler. The president was free 
to develop his own policy, supported by his new cabinet and 
his coterie of Virginian friends. He was personally in favor of 
annexation. He also saw in the issue a promising platform on 
which to unite the slave interests of the South and the expan- 
sionist sentiment of the North for the next presidential cam- 
paign. Moreover, Sam Houston, who, in spite of a certain 
affectation of indifference, was always at heart an annexationist, 
had been reelected to the presidency of the Texan republic in 
1 84 1. Mexico herself stimulated the movement when, after 
six years of inactivity, she suddenly sent a considerable army 
northward for the reconquest of the lost province, inciting the 
adventurers of our Southwestern States to shoulder their mus- 
kets again and march to the defense of their fellow-citizens" in 
Texas. Finally, the danger of British intervention in Texas 

iThe behavior of Mexico in regard to these claims shows what kind of gov- 
ernment we had to deal with in the decade preceding the Mexican War. Al- 
though the convention was concluded in 1838, more than two years elapsed before 
Mexico appointed her commissioners, and another two, filled with excuses and 
evasions, before she agreed to pay the modest sum of $2,000,000 in equal quar- 
terly installments extending over a space of five years. After the first three in- 
stallments of $100,000 each, Mexico stopped paying. 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 415 



began to loom large and to arouse all those fears and resent- 
ments which the American people have been quick to feel 
whenever the menace of European intervention has appeared 
on this continent. 

The interest of Great Britain in a free and independent Texas 
was obvious. She was willing to guarantee Texas a large 
loan in return for the abolition of slavery in the republic. She 
was eager to have in Texas a source of supply of cotton and 
other raw materials for which she could exchange her manu- 
factures unhampered by the tariff laws of the American Union. 
Her minister in Mexico was working to effect an arrangement' 
by which the independence of Texas might be acknowledged 
and hostilities brought to an end. As mediator between Mexico 
and her revolted province and as guarantor of the independence 
granted, Great Britain would inevitably have an enormous 
influence in both countries. The British government protested 
^ at every stage in the negotiations over Texas (and doubtless 
with truth) that her diplomatic conduct was perfectly cor- 
rect"; nevertheless, there was a widespread feeling in our 
country that Great Britain intended to establish a kind of ^'pro- 
tectorate" over Texas. And against that the Monroe Doctrine 
was explicit.^ 

When the two great Whig leaders were removed from public 
life by the retirement of Clay from the Senate in the spring 
of 1842 and the resignation of Webster from the cabinet a year 
later, Tyler moved directly toward his goal. Upshur of Vir- 
ginia succeeded to the headship of the Department of State in 
the autumn of 1843 began negotiations with Texas for a 
treaty of annexation. The Texan government, under the rebuff 
that it had suffered from the Van Buren administration, had 
given up the idea of annexation and concluded treaties with 
France (1839), Holland (1840), Belgium and Great Britain 
(1842). The latter power was determined that Texas should 

iPor example, the Washington Madisonian (President Tyler's organ) said that 
if England interfered in Texas, the whole American people "would rise like one 
vast nest of hornets," and that the Western States " at the call of Captain Tyler 
would pour their noble sons down the Mississippi valley by millions." 



4t6 the united states of AMERICA 



not be joined to the United States. Brougham made speeches 
in the House of Lords (August, 1843) denouncing the ^'hideous 
crime of breeding negroes," and members of ParUament openly 
declared that England must maintain her ascendency in 
Texas." In the summer of 1843 the British minister in Mexico 
succeeded in bringing about a truce between Mexico and Texas, 
which gave promise of the recognition of the independence of 
the latter if she would not ally herself with the United States. 
Furthermore, the antislavery forces were aroused by the re- 
newal of the attempt at annexation. John Quincy Adams and 
twelve of his associates in the House issued a defiant address 
in March, 1843, charging that the American settlements had 
been made in Texas, the revolt from Mexico instigated, and the 
efforts of Mexico to regain Texas prevented, solely in order 
that ^^the undue ascendency of the slave power should be 
secured and riveted beyond all redemption," and that there 
was no obligation on the part of the states of the Union to ac- 
quiesce in a treaty of annexation — since such a treaty could not 
be made under the Constitution." Annexation, said other 
warning voices at the North, would lead to war with Mexico,^ 
would increase the power of the South, would whet a desire to 
acquire Mexico and Canada, would saddle us with a large Texan 
debt, and would enrich the speculators in Texan lands. "It is 
the contemptible scheme of a poor miserable traitor tempora- 
rily acting as President," said a Boston paper. John Greenleaf 
Whittier rang the tocsin for the country in danger : 

Up the hillside, down the glen, 
Rouse the sleeping citizen, 
Summon out the might of men. 

But not all the men of the North felt like Adams and Whit- 
tier. Secretary Upshur appealed to the manufacturer and the 

iln the autumn of 1842 our Commodore Jones on the Pacific coast, acting on 
a rumor that war had actually broken out between the United States and Mex- 
ico, sailed into the Californian harbor of Monterey, occupied the town, and ran 
up the American flag on ihe government building. As soon as he learned of the 
falseness of the rumor he retired, and apologies were made. But the incident 
gave color to the charge that we were anxious for war. 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 



417 



merchant by insisting on the advantages which would ac- 
crue from annexation: cheaper cotton, new harbors, enlarged 
markets. Our exports to Texas had shrunk since 1839 from 
$1,687,082 to $190,604. From an economic point of view, at 
least, the new repubhc was fast becoming a British protectorate. 
If the establishment of a free Texas under English auspices 
would endanger the South by furnishing a refuge for fugitive 
slaves or a base for abolitionist raids, it would also menace the 
protective system of the North by offering an opportunity for 
smuggling millions of dollars' worth of British manufactures 
across the borders, where little respect for tariff laws existed. 

When Upshur met his tragic death, in February, 1844, by 
the explosion of a new gun on the ship of war Princeton, his 
work was continued by his successor in the State Department, 
John C. Calhoun, an even more ardent annexationist. Calhoun 
was ambitious for the presidency, and this seemed to be his 
chance. He was not embarrassed, like Tyler, with past Whig 
connections. He did not have to reconcile a Southern policy 
with Northern antislavery feeling, like the New Yorker Van 
Buren. He was an avowed slavery champion and expansionist. 
He used boldness and even disingenuous audacity to compass 
his end. When Lord Aberdeen wrote a letter to Pakenham, 
the British minister in Washington, which only repeated the 
expressions of England's interest in emancipation in Texas, as 
in the whole world, Calhoun represented it as a new and dan- 
gerous attack of Great Britain on the peculiar institution" 
of the South; and, in spite of Aberdeen's explicit denial of 
any intent to ^Misturb their [Texas's] internal tranquillity or 
thereby to affect the prosperity of the American Union," Cal- 
houn declared that if we did not take Texas, England would. 
Texas having been assured (by Calhoun's agent) that no 
harm would come to her if she entered upon negotiations, the 
treaty was signed on April 12, 1844. It provided that Texas 
should become a territory of the Union, that she should sur- 
render her public lands, and that the American government 
should assume her debt iip to $10,000,000. On April 22 John 
Quincy Adams wrote in his "Diary," "The treaty for the annex- 



4i8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



ation of Texas to the Union was this day sent to the Senate, 
and with it went the freedom of the human race." 

The presidential campaign of 1844 was approaching. A few 
days after Adams's obituary on the freedom of the human race 
Henry Clay^ already assured of the Whig nomination, published 
his famous ^'Raleigh letter" in a Washington paper, in which 
he said that the annexation of Texas would be tantamount to 
a declaration of war on Mexico and an act transcending the 
power of the executive. He regarded the project as a revengeful 
move on Tyler's part to disrupt the Whig party. It was, he 
said, dangerous to the Union, inexpedient in the present finan- 
cial condition of the country, and not called for by any general 
expression of opinion." On the evening of the same day a 
letter from Van Buren, the most likely nominee of the Demo- 
crats, appeared in another Washington paper, disapproving 
annexation, but in more guarded terms. Clay was unanimously 
nominated by the Whigs at Baltimore (May i), and the plat- 
form of the convention, by his request, was silent on the subject 
of Texas. In the Democratic convention, held in the same city 
(May 27), Van Buren led on the first ballot, but failed to get 
the two-thirds vote necessary to nominate. The friends of 
annexation, who could not stake the success of the Democratic 
party on the purely sectional candidate Calhoun, finally united 
on James K. Polk of Tennessee, a ^^dark horse," who first 
figured with 44 votes on the eighth ballot, and on the ninth 
carried every delegation of the convention in a veritable stam- 
pede. Polk was a conscientious, diligent man of moderate 
ability, somewhat slow and inelastic in mind^ often confusing 
insistence on a detail with fidelity to a principle. His ambition 
in 1844 was limited to a nomination for the vice presidency. 
He had served inconspicuously as Speaker of the House, and 
one term as governor of Tennessee, having been defeated in 
his two succeeding campaigns for the latter office. As a warm 
friend and political protege of Jackson's he could command the 
support of that large section of the Democratic party, both 
North and South, for whom the old hero was still an oracle; 
and as an ardent annexationist he could satisfy those Southern 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 419 



interests which were looking to Jackson's old rival Calhoun. 
The platform on which Polk ran declared for ^'the reoccu- 
pation of Oregon and the reannexation of Texas at the earliest 
practicable period" as great American measures."^ 

Early in June, Calhoun's treaty of annexation was defeated 
in the Senate by 16 yeas to 35 nays. This crushing defeat of a 
treaty for which both Upshur and Calhoun had confidently 
claimed a two-thirds majority was due to a combination of 
reasons, in which real opposition to the acquisition of Texas 
probably played a small part. Some of the potent factors were 
fidelity to Clay in his ^'Raleigh letter"; fear of precipitating 
war with Mexico; unwillingness to enrich the speculators in 
Texas land scrip ; reluctance to rousing another Missouri ques- 
tion ; and hostility to Calhoun for his high-handed conduct of 
the negotiations, his manifest bid for the presidency, his disin- 
genuous use of the Pakenham correspondence, and his commit- 
ment of the government to a military and naval protection of 
Texas pending the discussions. 

The defeat of the treaty brought the Texas issue before the 
people at the polls in November. When Clay found himself 
opposed to Polk, an avowed annexationist, instead of to Van 
Buren, as he had expected, he was embarrassed by the Raleigh 
letter" and wrote other letters to the effect that he "would be 
glad to see Texas admitted on fair terms," and that "slavery 
ought not to affect the question one way or the other." This 
blowing hot and cold, to win both North and South, disgusted 
the antislavery Whig leaders, like Seward, Corwin, Fillmore, and 
Webster. It put them on the defensive to "explain" their can- 
didate's position and convinced them that Clay lacked moral 
conviction on the subject. Enough Whigs in Michigan and New 
York cast their ballots for the abolitionist candidate, Birney, 
to throw those states into the Polk column. At the same time, 

1 On the same day as the Democratic convention a large body of delegates met 
in Baltimore and renominated Tyler for the presidency. But the Tyler ticket 
had no strength. On the assurance from Jackson and other leaders of the party 
that he would be received back into the Democratic fold without penalty to his 
followers, Tyler resigned his candidacy and led his following into the Polk camp. 



420 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



however, Clay carried his own state of Kentucky and his op- 
ponent's state of Tennessee, both of which on the single issue 
of annexation would have gone to Polk. And with Michigan 
and New York in the Clay column and Kentucky and Tennessee 
in the Polk column, the latter would still have won the election. 
The Democrats undoubtedly profited by a large number of 
votes of fraudulently naturalized foreigners in the Middle 
States, as well as by the clever representation, by party leaders 
in Pennsylvania, of Polk as a friend of the tariff of 1842. The 
gallant Clay was thus for a third time defeated for the pres- 
idency, and, to make the humiliation doubly bitter, by a man 
almost obscure. The electoral vote was 170 to 105, but Polk's 
popular majority was less than 40,000. 

In spite of the complexity of issues in the campaign, and in 
spite of the meager margin in the popular vote, the Democrats 
declared that the voice of the people had given a clear mandate 
for annexation. Tyler did not wait for Polk to carry out the 
mandate. To his last session of Congress, which convened in 
December, 1844, he announced, with not the strictest regard for 
truth, that ^^a large majority of the states had declared for 
annexation."^ After a debate extending through the whole ses- 
sion, both Houses passed a resolution (132 to 76 in the House, 
27 to 25 in the Senate) for the admission of Texas to the Union, 
on condition that she should frame and submit to Congress a 
constitution before January i, 1846. Texas was to surrender 
her public buildings, works of defense, ports and harbors, to 
the United States^ retaining her public lands and her debt. The 
United States were to assume the controversy over her bound- 
aries. Four other states might, with her consent, be carved 
from her territory. Slavery was to be prohibited north of the 
line 36° 30'. 

The resolution was signed by Tyler on March i, and two 
days later A. J. Donelson, Jackson's nephew, was dispatched to 
Texas, where he labored with tact and diligence to secure the 
acceptance of the terms. Great Britain, in a last attempt to 

iThe vote by states was actually is to 11 : 8 Southern and 7 Northern states 
for Polk, and 5 Southern and 6 Northern states for Clay. 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 421 



prevent the absorption of Texas into the Union, persuaded 
Mexico to agree to a treaty (May 19, 1845) recognizing the 
independence of Texas if she would remain a separate republic. 
But the Texan Senate, convinced by Donelson's assurances of 
our good will, unanimously rejected the Mexican offer. On 
July 4, 1845, ^ convention of Texan delegates adopted by a 
unanimous vote a constitution accepting annexation to the 
United States, and the people of Texas ratified the constitution 
in October with only 44 dissenting voices. Congress received 
the new state by a large majority in both Houses, President 
Polk signed the act of admission (December 29, 1845), and the 
laws of the Union were formally extended over the land beyond 
the Sabine. On a February day of 1846 the blue flag of Texas, 
with its lone white star — the emblem of the republic which for 
ten years had lived its precarious life of poverty, intrigue, and 
war — was hauled down, and in its place were raised the Stars 
and Stripes. 

The Mexican War 

The annexation of Texas was one of the most fateful events 
in our history. It was the first link in a chain of consequences 
which ended in secession and civil war. For it precipitated a 
struggle with Mexico, which brought us new Western territory, 
in which was established a new principle for the control of 
slavery, which was the pretext for the repeal of the Missouri 
Compromise, which roused the North to form the Republican 
party, whose election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency 
drove the South to secede and make the appeal to arms. The 
historian, looking back through the refracting medium of an 
atmosphere clouded with the sectional strife of a score of years, 
from the annexation of Texas to the surrender of Lee at 
Appomattox, is tempted to see in the annexation policy only a 
deliberate provocation of the strife, "a dark-lantern con- 
spiracy," "a diabolical plot," to get "bigger pens to cram with 
slaves." But this judgment is not fair to the facts in the case. 
Texas was annexed by majorities in both Houses of Congress, 
after an enormous amount of discussion and argument and after 



422 THE UNITED STATES OF AAIERICA 

a national election favorable to a candidate who ran on a plat- 
form calling for annexation as a great American measure." 
Moreover, great as the interest of the slaveholders might be in 
the project, the general sentiment in favor of territorial expan- 
sion was greater. That we should carry our boundary to the 
Rio Grande, and so regain the region ceded" to Spain by the 
treaty of 1819; that we should extend our protection over our 
^^fellow-citizens" in Texas; that we should rebuke Mexico for 
her impudent and impotent defiance; that w^e should thwart 
Great Britain's designs to dictate the policy of a country on our 
borders, — all these were powerful motives with thousands of 
voters who had no wish to extend the limits of slave soil. A few 
prophetic souls might foresee the consequences and heed James 
Russell Lowell's warning that ^'they enslave their children's 
children who make compromise with sin," but the majority were 
ready to take possession of Texas and leave the reckoning with 
slavery to the future. 

In the summer of 1843 the Mexican government had an- 
nounced to our minister that it would consider the passage of 
an act for the incorporation of Texas into the territory of the 
United States as equivalent to a declaration of war against the 
IMexican Republic. But this was a dog-in-the-manger poHcy. 
The Mexican iMinister of War himself confessed in 1844 that 
his country had made no serious attempt to subdue Texas after 
the battle of San Jacinto. Lord Palmerston characterized 
Mexico's prospects of regaining the lost province as ^'visionary," 
and Lord Ashburton told Clay in 1842 that England would 
sooner expect to see Texas conquer jMexico than ]\Iexico con- 
quer Texas. Even Almonte, the Mexican minister at Washing- 
ton, acknowledged to Upshur in 1844 that his country had no 
chance of recovering Texas but that it V\^as a point of honor" 
with IMexico not to recognize her independence. The point of 
honor, however, was quickly waived, as we have seen, in the 
spring of 1,845, when annexation was imminent. The sole aim 
of IMexico (and Great Britain) in Texas was to keep that state 
out of the American Union. This is not a justification for our 
annexation of Texas, but it is a sufficient answer to those bis- 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 423 



torians who have shown themselves so tender of Mexico's vio- 
lated ^'sovereignty" in the province. 

Furthermore, the unbridled insolence of the Mexican officials 
and press toward the United States could not but encourage the 
war spirit in both countries. John Slidell of Louisiana was sent 
by President Polk in the autumn of 1845 to negotiate with 
Mexico the adjustment of our claims and of the boundary of 
Texas. He was authorized to offer Mexico $25,000,000 for 
California and $5,000,000 for New Mexico, but ''at all events, 
to take up the matter in a prudent and friendly spirit, and to 
conciliate the good will of the Mexicans." He was refused an 
audience by two successive Mexican presidents, who did not 
dare risk their precarious authority by seeming to make any 
concessions to the United States or running counter to the 
blustering war spirit of their countrymen. It is true that Polk 
wanted Upper California and instructed Slidell to negotiate for 
its purchase, but only if he could do so "without endangering 
the restoration of amicable relations with Mexico." The re- 
proach heaped on Polk that he "drove Mexico into war" is 
unjust. The United States was not the wolf and Mexico the 
lamb of La Fontaine's fable. It was Mexico that insisted on 
war and began the hostilities. The Mexican authorities believed 
that our army was contemptible and cowardly, that it would fall 
an easy prey to their own brilliant generals, and that the rapid 
victory over the "bulHes of the North" would confirm their 
own dictatorship over the Mexican people. When Polk was 
denounced in the United States (as he has been ever since) for 
forcing a war on Mexico, he was being reviled by the Mexicans 
for trying to force peace upon them ! Santa Anna himself con- 
fessed openly in 1847 that "the Mexicans desired the war." 
Of course it is an easy solution to sneer at all of Polk's efforts at 
peace as camouflage and to cry with Alexander Stephens of 
Georgia, "Polk the Mendacious!" But another Georgian, 
Robert Toombs, said, "Polk never desired any war but war on 
the Whigs." "It is hard to think of any rational method to 
conciliate Mexico," says Justin H. Smith, "that Polk did not 
put into operation." 



424 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

Having annexed Texas, it was our duty to protect her soil. 
Mexican troops were grouped at Matamoras, on the southern 
bank of the Rio Grande. The horrors of the Alamo and 
Goliad might be repeated. General Zachary Taylor, in com- 
mand of about 2000 regular troops in the Southwest, had been 
ordered to proceed into Texas in the summer of 1845 and had 
established his camp near Corpus Christi, on the Nueces River. 
When word came, early in 1846, that the Mexican government 
would not receive Slidell, Polk ordered Taylor to advance to 
the Rio Grande. Here Taylor erected a fort opposite Mat- 
amoras as a warning to the Mexicans not to cross the river, 
which Texas claimed as her boundary line. Taylor offered to 
keep the river open if the Mexican commander Ampudia would 
promise to refrain from hostilities, but the offer was refused. 
Instead, Ampudia ordered Taylor to return to the Nueces 
within twenty-four hours.^ On April 24, 1846, the Mexicans 
crossed the river and captured a reconnoitering party of about 
60 dragoons under Captain Thornton. When Taylor with- 
drew to Point Isabel to protect his base of supplies and receive 
reenforcements sent from New Orleans, the Mexicans crossed 
the river in force. Taylor met them at Palo Alto, about ten 
miles north of the Rio Grande, on May 8, and inflicted a severe 
defeat on them. The next day he drove them from the wooded 
ravine of Resaca de la Palma back to the south side of the 
river. On the eighteenth he occupied the town of Matamoras, 
and the invasion of Mexico was begun. 

Meantime President Polk, whose purpose was to "pursue a 
bold and firm course" toward Mexico and to "conquer a 
peace" by waging war with the sword in one hand and the olive 
branch in the other, was maturing his plans in Washington. On 
the very day that the battle of Palo Alto was fought, Slidell, 
returned from his fruitless mission, called at the White House. 
The next day news arrived, after the adjournment of the cabinet 



1 As Mexico claimed the whole of Texas, Taylor's presence on the Nueces with 
an army was, of course, as much an "invasion" of Mexican territory as was his 
presence on the Rio Grande. 




The Mexican War and the Mexican Cession 



426 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



meeting, of the attack on Captain Thornton. Polk reassembled 
the cabinet in the evening, and with their unanimous consent 
decided to send a war message to Congress. After reiterated 
menaces," said the message, ^'Mexico has passed the boundary 
of the United States and has shed American blood on American 
soil. . . . War exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to 
avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself." The President 
called for volunteers to serve for not less than six or twelve 
months. In spite of some opposition by the Whigs, a bill to 
raise 50,000 troops and $10,000,000 was passed through the 
House by a vote of 174 to 14, and the Senate by a vote of 40 
to 2. On May 13 Polk signed the bill, and the gates of war were 
opened. Except for New England, where the abolitionist spirit 
was most strong, the country responded with enthusiasm to the 
call for troops. Soon 23,000 volunteers from the Western and 
Southern states were in arms. The cry was, ^^Ho for the halls 
of the Montezumas ! " 

The plan of the administration was to take possession of 
New Mexico, Upper California, and the northern provinces of 
Mexico — in all of which distant regions the authority of the 
Mexican government was weak — and, holding these regions in 
pawn, force Mexico to the terms which we had been unable to 
get by negotiation. The ^'conquest" of this vast territory in 
the summer and autumn months of 1846 offered little difficulty 
beyond the resistance of mountain and desert. Colonel S. W. 
Kearny set out from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, near the end 
of June, and in August entered Santa Fe with about 1800 men, 
a Mexican force of 4000 retreating before him without a fight. 
Raising the American flag, he declared the territory of New 
Mexico ^'incorporated in the United States" and absolved the 
inhabitants from their allegiance to Mexico. A few days later 
he published a code of laws for the territory, providing for a 
general assembly to meet the first of August. He then set out, 
by way of the Rio Grande and Gila valleys, for California with 
but 300 dragoons, having detached Colonel Doniphan with 
850 men to join General Wool at the Mexican town of Chi- 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 427 



huahua.^ When Kearny was eleven days out of Santa Fe he 
met the scout Kit Carson coming eastward, who told him that 
California was conquered by American arms. Continuing with 
100 dragoons, Kearny reached the CaHfornia frontier at the 
beginning of December and, after some skirmishes with the 
natives at San Pascual, entered San Diego. 

The year had been filled with exciting events in California. 
That magnificent but neglected land lay open like a prize to 
the first power that should take it. Mexican authority there was 
only "a shadow." The province, according to a Mexican offi- 
cial, "had been forgotten for more than 20 years." The white 
inhabitants were ready to shake off their allegiance to Mexico, 
"not caring," as an American traveler observed, "what flag they 
exchanged for their own." An attache of the French legation 
in Mexico had suggested a French protectorate over California. 
The London Times was urging the British government to oc- 
cupy the province. But no power seemed willing itself to take 
California or to let any other power take it. Much as Polk 
wanted Upper California, he wrote to Larkin, our confidential 
agent at Monterey, that "the President would make no effort 
and use no influence to induce California to become one of the 
free and independent states of this Union" unless the people 
of CaHfornia should desire it and it could be done "without 
affording Mexico just cause of complaint" (October, 1845). 
Some time earlier Commodore Sloat, in command of our naval 
forces on the Pacific coast, had been ordered to be "assiduously 
careful not to commit any act of aggression," but to seize San 
Francisco if he should learn "with certainty beyond a doubt" 
that Mexico had declared war. Sloat got news of the battles 
on the Rio Grande at the end of May, 1846, and after long 

^Wool, who had marched from San Antonio, Texas, to occupy Chihuahua, 
changed his plans for a variety of reasons^ political and strategic, and joined 
Taylor's army of occupation at Saltillo. Doniphan, ignorant of Wool's move- 
ment, proceeded to Chihuahua by way of El Paso, fighting now and then, and 
finally, after a march of a thousand miles, found Wool at Saltillo. All this tedi- 
ous marching of Wool and Doniphan had little direct bearing on the fortunes of 
the war, except to demonstrate the courage and endurance of the American soldier. 



42 8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



hesitation (for which he was later superseded in his com- 
mand by Commodore R. F. Stockton) sailed into the harbor 
of Monterey and raised the American flag a second time above 
the town (July 7, 1846). 

The Stars and Stripes had floated for only twelve days over 
Monterey when a band of 160 men, ^Vith gaunt bodies, frames 
of steel, shaggy beards, and an air of indescribable courage," 
rode into the town. They were American pioneers, and at their 
head was Captain John C. Fremont^ topographical engineer 
and explorer in the service of the United States. Fremont was 
making the third of those extended expeditions between the 
Missouri River and the Pacific coast which earned for him the 
title of ^Hhe Pathfinder." The prospect of war with Mexico 
and the caution of his superior at Washington, far from deter- 
ring him from his journey, only made the deep-set eyes beneath 
his high narrow forehead and shock of inky black hair burn 
brighter with the fire of adventure. When he entered California, 
early in 1846, with an armed band, he was warned by Governor 
Castro to leave the province. Instead, he built a fort and 
awaited the Californians' attack — in vain. He then proceeded 
to the border of Oregon, where he was overtaken by Lieutenant 
Gillespie, under government orders, and persuaded to return 
to the Sacramento valley. While he was encamped here some 
of his men joined a party of American settlers under William 
B. Ide in seizing the town of Sonoma and proclaiming the 
Republic of California under the famous ^^Bear Flag."^ On 
the appeal of the insurgents Fremont put himself at the head 
of the Bear Flag movement, and was preparing to resist in arms 
the force which Castro had dispatched for the recapture of 
Sonoma, when the news came of Sloat's seizure of Monterey. 
The bear then came down, and the Stars and Stripes were raised 
in his place. Fremont, now transformed from the explorer into 
the soldier, joined Stockton in the conquest of the southern part 

iThe flag consisted of a piece of white cotton, to the bottom of which was 
sewed a strip of red flannel. In the upper left-hand corner of the white was 
painted a red star, and to the right of it an "impressionistic" bear. Under the 
star and bear were the words " California Republic." 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 429 



of Upper California. It was here that Kearny met them, as 
we have seen, and by his victory at San Pascual helped to secure 
the conquest. In January, 1847, the California leaders sur- 
rendered to Fremont, and the shadowy authority of Mexico in 
the province came to an end. Fremont, encouraged doubtless 
by his strenuous father-in-law, Senator Benton, intended to 
organize California as a territory of the United States and 
assume the governorship himself. But Kearny, with positive 
orders from President Polk to hold the province under military 
rule, vindicated his authority after an unseemly quarrel with 
Fremont and Stockton which resulted in Fremont's court- 
martial and dismissal from the service. The President remitted 
the sentence, but Fremont resigned. 

Meanwhile Taylor had strengthened his hold on the northern 
provinces of Mexico. In September, 1846, he seized the im- 
portant town of Monterey, the capital of Nuevo Leon, after a 
fierce three days' battle which ended in a fight from house to 
house through the streets of the town. In the next few months he 
occupied Saltillo and Victoria, the capitals of the two provinces 
flanking Nuevo Leon. At the beginning of the new year he 
held a line of 200 miles in northern Mexico with 10,000 troops. 
Brave in battle and the idol of his men for his rough and 
ready" democracy, Taylor was nevertheless lacking in many 
of the qualities of a great commander. He was often careless in 
his strategy, reckless in his tactics, and defiant to the point 
of insubordination in his treatment of orders from the War 
Department. Against any other opponent than the cowardly 
Ampudia his operations at Monterey, said the best military 
critics, would have resulted in disaster. The victories of 1846 
on the Rio Grande and in the Mexican provinces encouraged him 
to listen with increasing attentiveness to the suggestions of the 
Whig politicians that he would be a strong candidate at the next 
presidential election. And when, in November, 1846, the ad- 
ministration, against his advice, decided on a direct march on 
Mexico City by way of Vera Cruz and selected General Win- 
field Scott for the command, Taylor was provoked into a violent 
attack on Scott and the War Department. He had been de- 



430 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

prived of half his troops and left with only a few thousand "raw 
recruits." Scott had acted in "a most contemptible manner'' 
behind his back to supplant him in command and "sacrifice" 
him on the soil of Mexico. The administration had slighted 
him in order to kill his chances for the presidency. On 
January 26, 1847, Taylor wrote to his friend Crittenden, the 
Whig senator from Kentucky, announcing his candidacy for 
the presidential nomination. 

The reason for the projected campaign against the Mexican 
capital was the conviction in the mind of Polk that only a bold 
stroke at the heart of the country would bring Mexico to terms. 
Repeated attempts at negotiation had failed. In spite of the 
rejection of Slidell, Polk had again approached the Mexican 
authorities after the battles on the Rio Grande, thinking that 
Taylor's victories might have inclined their hearts to peace. 
But disaster at a distance had little effect on the factional chiefs 
who were struggling for the control of the treasury at Mexico 
City and whose most effective stock in trade was fervid rhetor- 
ical denunciation of the "cowardly adventurers" and "rapa- 
cious invaders" from the Republic of the North. Buchanan's 
notes were treated more like the supplications of a discouraged 
foe than the conciliatory advances of a victor. We even fished 
in the turbid waters of Mexican politics in the hope of landing 
the prize of peace. Santa Anna had been driven out of Mexico 
in 1845. When he promised from his exile in Cuba that he 
would negotiate terms with the United States on the basis of 
the Rio Grande boundary and the cession of Upper Cahfornia, 
Polk ordered Commodore Connor, our commander in the Gulf, 
to let him pass through the blockading squadron. Santa Anna 
landed at Vera Cruz in August, 1846, and soon got back his 
power in the distracted republic. But he found the war spirit 
so strong that he renounced the unpopular and uncongenial 
task of attempting to close the gates of the Temple of Janus. 
Instead, he put himself at the head of the war party, made 
frenzied appeals for a supreme effort of patriotism, and raised 
the best and largest army that Mexico had in the war — the 
"Army of Liberation," "Every day that passes without fighting 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 



431 



at the North/' he cried, ^'is a century of disgrace for Mexico." 

Early in January, 1847, intercepted letter from Scott to 
Taylor revealed to Santa Anna the plans of the Vera Cruz 
expedition. Knowing that Taylor's forces were greatly reduced, 
Santa Anna determined to drive him across the Rio Grande 
before Scott could strike at the heart of Mexico. As Santa Anna 
moved northward with his formidable army of 20,000 men, 
Taylor concentrated his ^^raw recruits" to secure the defenses of 
Saltillo, leaving General Wool to select a place for the stand 
against the approaching host. Wool chose a magnificent defen- 
sive position at the ranch of Buena Vista — a veritable Pass of 
Thermopylae. And here, on the twenty-second of February, with 
the watchword Honor of Washington" passing down the Amer- 
ican line, the operations began. Santa Anna's superior force 
enabled him to gain strong positions on the heights flanking the 
American army. The situation was one of utmost danger to 
our troops when the main battle began at dawn of the next day. 
The Mexicans, certain of victory, fought with all the impetu- 
ousness that exaltation lends to courage. Again and again it 
seemed as if the American army of less than 5000 men must 
be swept off the field. Indeed, the first reports of the battle 
that reached Washington were that our army was routed. But 
Taylor, arriving on the scene from Saltillo about the middle of 
the morning, was worth the reenforcement of thousands of 
troops. Intrepid and imperturbable, he sat in his saddle on the 
back of ^^Old Whitey," directing the battle, while our soldiers 
cheered him and fought like demons. Bragg, Sherman, Rey- 
nolds, Davis, Thomas (names to be illustrious in our Civil 
War), with Wool, Hardin, and McKee, performed miracles. 
Finally the superiority of our artillery fire prevailed against the 
masses of the Mexican infantry. At nightfall Santa Anna's 
army withdrew, leaving their pickets and camp fires to indicate 
that they would renew the battle on the morrow. But when 
morning came the exhausted Americans, springing to their guns, 
saw the backs of their retreating foes. Taylor and Wool fell 
weeping into each other's arms. It was a glorious victory in 
the face of tremendous odds, against the largest army that 



432 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



American troops had ever met. And it made Zachary Taylor 
the next president of the United States. 

Meanwhile Scott's troops were being conveyed down the 
stormy waters of the Gulf of Mexico from the mouth of the 
Rio Grande to a point near Vera Cruz. They landed on 
March 9^ and twenty days later took the city. Then began the 
romantic march up through the mountains to the city of Mexico. 
Scott appealed, not without success, to the civilian population 
to remain quietly in their homes. The American army, he said, 
had come to deliver them from the misrule of the unscrupulous 
politicians who had brought on the war. Toward the people 
of Mexico it had only the most friendly disposition. It would 
respect persons and property and pay liberally for all supplies 
furnished. A Mexican force of 13,000 men under Santa Anna 
was posted on the heights of Cerro Gordo, commanding the 
high road. Scott's 9000 drove them in utter rout in a two days' 
battle (April 17-18), capturing 3000 prisoners. After that the 
prestige of the Americans was so great that they were opposed 
only here and there by guerrilla bands, while the people of the 
towns generally welcomed them with good-natured curiosity 
and the hopes of unwonted profits. In August, Scott reached 
the outskirts of the capital, and after the victories of Contreras 
and Churubusco against the troops which the quarreling factions 
of politicians had, with the last shame of desperation, put into 
the field, was within four or five miles of the gates of the city. 

Here Scott paused to conclude an armistice with the Mexican 
commander while another attempt at negotiation was made. 
Nicholas Trist, chief clerk of the Department of State, had 
arrived at Scott's headquarters in May, instructed by the 
President "to enter into arrangements with the government of 
Mexico for the suspension of hostilities." Scott at first resented 
this invasion of his military authority and charged it to the 
President's willingness to embarrass his Whig generals. For 
some days he and the commissioner were not on speaking terms. 
But Scott was a kindly, generous man, without guile ; and Trist 
was tactful and courteous. Before the end of June the two were 
the best of friends. Trist had considerable latitude in his in- 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 433 



structions in regard to the compensation which he might offer 
Mexico, but he was to insist on our retention of Texas, New 
Mexico, and California. When the Mexican counterproposals 
refused to cede us any part of New Mexico or California, set 
the boundary of Texas at the Nueces, and demanded that we 
pay the cost of the war and recompense the Mexicans for their 
^'ruined fortunes," — terms that a conqueror might have im- 
posed, — there was no way left but to prosecute the war to an 
end. Santa Anna broke the armistice by strengthening the de- 
fenses of the city and cutting off American supplies. Then Scott 
closed in upon him. On September 8 he drove the Mexicans 
from Molino del Rey, and five days later stormed the high rock 
fort of Chapultepec. The Mexican troops in the city fled to 
Guadalupe-Hidalgo as the city council sent offers of capitulation 
to the American headquarters. At dawn of September 14 our 
troops, ^Mecorated with mud, the red stains of battle, and rough 
bandages," entered the gates. Marching to the Plaza between 
sidewalks, windows, balconies, and housetops crowded with 
people," they raised a battle-torn American flag above the pal- 
ace, while General Scott strode up the stairway of the Halls 
of the Montezumas" to write the dispatch of victory. 

The fall of the capital eliminated Santa Anna (the curse of 
Mexico for a score of years) and brought to power a gov- 
ernment desirous of peace. Trist had already been recalled 
by an administration determined at last to deal harshly with 
Mexico. But he stayed, counter to his orders, and made peace 
with Mexican commissioners at Guadalupe-Hidalgo on the basis 
of his former instructions. Mexico acknowledged our title to 
Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California, and in return we 
paid Mexico $15,000,000 and assumed claims of our citizens 
against the Mexican government up to $3,250,000. Some mem- 
bers of the cabinet, including Secretary of State Buchanan, 
were in favor of taking a part of Mexico itself, but Polk held 
firmly to the line of the Rio Grande. In the Senate the treaty 
of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was opposed by those who wanted no 
territory, those who wanted more territory, and those who were 
chagrined that Polk should finish up his program so success- 



434 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



fully at the opening of a presidential year. Nevertheless, the 
treaty was ratified on March lo, 1848, by the narrow margin 
of 38 to 14. A change of four votes would have defeated it. 

The Mexican War has been generally condemned by our 
historians as a blot on the honor of the country — a war pro- 
moted by the slavery interests, precipitated by an aggres- 
sive president, and prosecuted with a conqueror's ruthlessness. 
But this persistent attitude seems to rest rather on prejudices 
derived from the political situation of the time than on a dis- 
passionate judgment of the documents. The abolitionists car- 
ried over their indignation at the annexation of Texas into a 
denunciation of every move of the United States in the war, 
and even into a mawkish approbation of Mexico's ^'virtue, 
courage, and fortitude under the most disastrous circumstances." 
Lowell's immortal ^^Biglow Papers" not only ridiculed our army 
and counseled resistance to enlistment but even contemplated 
disunion with apparent equanimity. The expansionist senti- 
ment was ^^half of it ignorance and t'other half rum"; its 
object, only bigger pens to cram with slaves." 

They jest want this Calif orny 
So's to lug new slave states in 

was Lowell's interpretation ; but the fact was that when Cali- 
fornia framed her constitution in 1849 ^ single delegate 
voted for slavery, and there never was a moment of danger that 
California would enter the Union as a slave state. 

Whig orators in Congress hoped that the Mexicans would 
welcome our soldiers to ^'hospitable graves." Whig newspapers 
declared that ''every heart worthy of American liberty had 
an impulse to join the Mexicans," and that it would be "a 
joy to hear that the hordes under Scott and Taylor were 
every man of them swept into the next world." Although Con- 
gress had sanctioned our occupation of the region beyond the 
Nueces by the establishment of customs laws there and had 
supported the President's war message in both Houses by tre- 
mendous majorities, Webster had the effrontery, in a speech in 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 435 



Faneuil Hall in Boston, to threaten Polk with impeachment 
for involving the country in war without the consent of Con- 
gress. The truth is that all the denunciation of the war that 
was not honest abolitionist opposition was Whig politics. And 
the only comment necessary on the honesty of the Whig's 
^'pacifism" is that they exploited the most popular of the 
victorious generals of the war in their presidential campaign 
of 1848. They pretended that they did not want the United 
States to beat Mexico, but what they really meant was that 
they did not want Polk's administration to beat Mexico. 
^^Clay, Webster, and the other Whigs," wrote Markoe from 
Vera Cruz, ^^have by their speeches done more to prevent peace 
than as though they had arrayed 10,000 Mexicans against 
Scott." ^'Mexican Whigs" was the not inappropriate epithet 
bestowed upon them.^ 

To contend that the Mexican War was not dishonorable, 
however, is not to deny that it was unfortunate. It is possible 
that a man of greater tact and patience than Polk in the White 
House could have kept the sentiment of expansion within the 
bounds of peace. It is possible that the vicissitudes of Mexican 
politics might have brought into power an administration from 
which we could have got by purchase what we took by arms. 
It is possible that more friendly relations with Great Britain 
would have removed what we believed to be a necessity for 
acting promptly and decisively. But all these are only pos- 
sibilities. What is certain is that no great part of the American 
people realized at the time that the prize of the Western lands 
over which their explorers and pathfinders had marched, and 
which beckoned with the promise of a new empire for democ- 
racy, would turn to ashes in the acquisition. The one and only 
recompense of war is that it unites a people more firmly in 

1 Justin H. Smith, in his exhaustive and judicious volumes on "The War with 
Mexico," sums up the behavior of the Whigs in a single pithy sentence : " They 
denounced the war enough to incriminate themselves when they supported it, 
and they supported it enough to stultify themselves when they condemined it" 
(Vol. II, p. 283). 



436 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



devotion to the highest national ideals. But the Mexican War 
was the harbinger of naught but strife and discord.^ 

The platform on which Polk was elected in 1844 called for 
the ^Preoccupation" of Oregon as well as the "reannexation" 
of Texas. Oregon (see map, p. 319) comprised the vast ter- 
ritory west of the Rocky Mountains between the parallels of 
42° (Spain's northern boundary by the treaty of 1819) and 54° 
40' (Russia's southern boundary by the treaty of 1824). Since 
1 81 8 it had been held in joint occupation with Great Britain, 
the renewal of the agreement in 1827 giving either party the 
right to terminate it on a year's notice to the other. Both the 
United States and Great Britain had claims to Oregon reaching 
back to the eighteenth century. In 1 792 Captain Gray of Boston 
had sailed into the mouth of the river which he named, after 
his ship, the Columbia." Lewis and Clark had traversed the 
Oregon region, wintering on the Pacific coast in 1805. Six 
years later John Jacob Astor had established the fur post of 
Astoria. The British had secured trading-rights on the Oregon 
coast from Spain, in the Nootka Sound convention of 1790, 
and the Northwest Company of Canada had extended its posts 
down into the Columbia valley. We took little interest in the 
distant region of Oregon until the missionaries, following in the 
track of the explorers and the fur-traders, in the early thirties 
began to appeal to the East for support. A few enthusiasts like 
Nathaniel Wyeth, Jason and Daniel Lee, and Marcus Whit- 
man^ started a pubHcity campaign to secure immigration to 
the region. But the response was slow. By the end of 1841 
probably not more than 300 American settlers had gone to the 
Oregon country. 

1 William H, Seward prophesied of the whole annexation policy that it would 
give to the slave interests "a fearful preponderance which may and probably will 
be speedily followed by demands to which the democratic, free labor states can- 
not yield ; and the denial of which will be made the ground of secession, nulHfi- 
cation, and disunion." 

2 Until it was exposed in 1900 by Professor E. G, Bourne, in the American 
Historical Review (Vol. VI, pp. 276-300), the legend of Marcus Whitman was a 
firm and cherished tradition of American history. According to that legend, 
Whitman, hearing at a dinner at one of the fur posts of the intention of the 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 



437 



The wave of expansionist sentiment which brought Texas 
into the Union stimulated migration to Oregon. Senators 
Benton and Linn of Missouri were especially active to secure 
legislation to encourage the settlement of the Far Northwest. 
Linn's bill providing for a line of forts from the Missouri River 
to the best pass over the Rockies, and the grant of a section 
of land to each immigrant over eighteen years of age, went 
through the Senate in February, 1843. Although it failed in 
the House, the discussion that it raised and the expectation of 
its becoming a law started a large emigration to Oregon. In 
June, for example, a caravan of nearly 900 settlers, in 200 
wagons, with 1300 head of cattle, started on a successful jour- 
ney across the Rockies. Other parties followed, swelling the 
immigrants to several thousands. The settlers in Oregon had 
already begun to take measures for their political protection. 
Organizing a provisional government, they petitioned Con- 
gress to extend the laws of the United States over their region. 
Enthusiastic conventions in the Middle States demanded that 
we should assert the Monroe Doctrine against Great Britain, 
build forts from the Missouri to the Pacific, and take possession 
of the whole of Oregon up to the boundary of Alaska (54° 40'). 
"Fifty-four forty or fight!" the slogan. 

This demand of the enthusiasts for "all of Oregon or none" 
had no sound basis. We had, since 1824, repeatedly discussed 
with Great Britain the division of the territory and had always 
professed ourselves satisfied with the extension of the line of 
49° to the Pacific. Great Britain, however, insisted on the 
Columbia as her southern boundary^ with the free navigation 
of the river for both countries; Even as late as July, 1845 
(after having asserted in his inaugural address of March 4 that 
"our title to the country of Oregon is clear and unquestion- 

British to occupy the region of Oregon south of the Columbia, mounted his horse 
and made a midwinter ride of 4000 miles across the continent to implore Tyler 
and Webster in the White House to "save Oregon." Whitman did cross the con- 
tinent to get aid for his mission station from the American Board of Foreign 
Missions in Boston, but he never held the dramatic interview with the President 
and the Secretary of State in which he implored them not to "sacrifice Oregon 
for a cod fishery." 



438 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



able"), Polk renewed the offer of the line of 49° to the British 
minister — only to be repulsed. In April, 1846, both Houses of 
Congress by large majorities (142 to 46, and 42 to 10) author- 
ized Polk to give the year's notice to Great Britain of the 
termination of the joint agreement of 1827. It was on the day 
after this vote that Captain Thornton's dragoons were attacked 
on the Rio Grande (p. 424). The President had no intention, 
in spite of the campaign bluster of ^Tifty-four forty or fight" 
and his own bold words in the inaugural, of going to war with 
Great Britain over a few degrees of latitude in Oregon, when a 
war with Mexico was imminent. He let the British ministry 
know that a proposal from them would be welcome, and when 
they sent over the draft of the treaty accepting the line of 49°, 
he accepted it on the advice of the Senate (June 10, 1846).^ 
Benton charged the administration with bullying tactics: 
the reason why we did not march up to the line 54° 40' with 
the same boldness that w^e marched down to the Rio Grande 
was that England was a strong power and Mexico a weak 
one. And since Benton's day this opinion has been frequently 
repeated by our historians.^ The facts, however, do not sup- 
port it. Polk worked far harder to induce the Mexican govern- 
ment to agree to a peaceful settlement than he did to conciliate 
Great Britain. If we did not march up to 54° 40' it was cer- 
tainly partly because we had no shadow of a claim to the 

^The boundary as provided by the treaty followed the 49th parallel westward 
from the Rockies to Puget Sound, and thence ran through the middle of the chan- 
nel to the Pacific. Great Britain was to have the whole of Vancouver Island with 
the free navigation of the Columbia. The Hudson's Bay Company was to receive 
$650,000. A dispute over the exact location of the boundary through the Sound 
was referred to the German Emperor for arbitration in 1871 and was decided in 
favor of our claims. 

2 ''With England which was strong we were ready to compound differences; 
from Mexico which was weak we w^ere disposed to snatch everything" (Wood- 
row Wilson, "Division and Reunion," p. 149). "Negotiation in the same spirit 
as that had with Great Britain would undoubtedly have settled the difficulty, but 
the President arrogated the right of deciding. . . . Mexico was actually goaded 
into the war" (Rhodes, Vol. I, p. 87). Not to mention extremists like Schouler, 
who speaks of our "profligate contempt of Mexico's rights of sovereignty" and 
of our "repeating the story of Pizarro, only with shabbier embellishments" 
(Vol. V, p. 443). 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 439 



boundary of 54° 40'. We had repeatedly offered the Hne of 49° 
ourselves. If we did not go to war with Great Britain as we 
did with Mexico it was due partially to the fact that Great 
Britain was civilized, reliable, and reasonable. She neither 
rejected our envoys nor insulted our government. On a hint 
from Washington her ministry sent us a treaty conceding the 
boundaries which we fairly claimed. While the Mexicans were 
clamoring for war to drive our armies from a state of our 
Union, the British were but restraining us from invading a ter- 
ritory which we had never pretended to occupy. The relative 
strength of Great Britain and Mexico had nothing to do with 
the merits of the case. 

The Mexican War had been in progress only three months 
when President Polk asked Congress (August 3, 1846) for an 
appropriation of $2,000,000 to help secure our boundary from 
Mexico. It was certain that a large transfer of territory from 
Mexico to the United States would be the first condition of 
peace. Stockton had already raised the American flag over 
the Californian town of Monterey ; Kearny was but a few days' 
march from Santa Fe in New Mexico (see page 426). The ad- 
vocates of the restriction of slavery got David Wilmot, a Demo- 
cratic congressman from Pennsylvania, to offer an amendment 
to the $2,000,000 bill to the effect that neither slavery nor 
involuntary servitude [should] ever exist in any part of the 
territory'' acquired from Mexico. The bill, including the Wil- 
mot Proviso, as the amendment was called, passed the House 
(87 to 64), but failed in the Senate because the hour agreed 
upon with the House for the adjournment of the session over- 
took Senator Davis of Massachusetts while he was arguing 
against a motion to strike out the amendment. When Congress 
met again in December, 1846, the bill was reintroduced, and 
again the House voted to incorporate the Wilmot Proviso (115 
to 105). The Senate rejected the Proviso by a vote of 31 to 21^ 

^Six of the votes of the majority came from senators of Northern states. If 
these six men had supported the Proviso it would have passed by a vote of 27 
to 25, and, unless vetoed by Polk, the bill excluding slavery from the newly won 
territory of the United States would have become a law in 1847. 



440 



THE UNITED STATES OF A:MERICA 



and on the last day of the session secured the consent of the 
House to the unamended bill. Although the Wilmot Proviso 
failed in 1847, it was revived in the House again and again 
in the two years following, and it remained before the country 
as the official demand of the liberty men of the North. Abraham 
Lincoln, who was a member of Congress from 1847 to 1849, 
said that he voted for the Proviso in the House more than 
forty times. 

The persistence of the advocates of the Wilmot Proviso 
aroused equal insistence on the part of Calhoun, Davis, and 
other Southern leaders that no restriction of slavery in the new 
territory should be allowed by Congress. Oregon was anxiously 
waiting for territorial organization in the summer of 1846, and 
President Polk urged in his messages of August and December 
that Congress proceed to the task. But when the House passed 
a bill which extended the antislavery provision of the Northwest 
Ordinance to Oregon f January 16, 1847), the Senate tabled it. 
There was no intention in the mind of the Southern senators of 
carrying slavery into Oregon. AVhat they objected to in the bill 
was the power of Congress to exclude slavery from Oregon. 
When the ratification of the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in the 
summer of 1848 made New Mexico and CaHfornia American soil. 
Polk urged the prompt organization of a territorial government 
for these provinces also. An attempt was made to settle the 
whole matter by the so-called Clayton Compromise of July, 
1848, according to which Oregon was to have complete ter- 
ritorial government with representation in Congress, while Cali- 
fornia and New IMexico were to be administered by a governor, 
a secretary, and judges of the Supreme Court. The question of 
slaver}^ was left to the Oregon legislature, but the governments 
of New jNIexico and California were forbidden to pass an}^ laws 
respecting the prohibition or establishment of African slavery 
— such being referred to the United States courts."^ This 
measure the Senate passed after an all-night battle (July 27), 
but the House tabled it. Finally, in August, 1848, the Senate 

iCorwin wittily said of this measure that it would be ''enacting not a law 
but a lawsuit." 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 



441 



so far receded from its position as to sanction the bill for the 
organization of Oregon^ including the restriction of slavery. 
But California and New Mexico still remained unorganized. 

Meantime the presidential campaign was in full swing. The 
Democratic convention, meeting at Baltimore on May 22, had 
nominated Governor Lewis Cass of Michigan, an ardent union- 
ist and expansionist, confident, ornate, with pretensions to dip- 
lomatic and military distinction. Cass was reputed ^^a northern 
man with southern principles" — popularly known as a ^'dough- 
face." The platform defended the Mexican War as ''just and 
necessary," and denied the power of Congress to interfere with 
the domestic institutions of the states. Every attempt in the 
convention to discuss the Wilmot Proviso was met with calls 
to order. The Whigs met at Philadelphia, June 7. In spite of 
their fervid condemnation of the war, they nominated the hero 
of Palo Alto and Buena Vista, whom they had been "groom- 
ing" for the presidency for a year or more. There were decided 
objections to Taylor as the candidate of a party which prided 
itself on "principles." When asked his opinions on the Bank 
and the tariff, he repKed with his bluff honesty that he had "had 
no time to investigate" them. He was a Louisiana planter with 
three hundred slaves. He had never voted, but in a private 
letter he said that he "certainly would have voted for Clay" 
in 1844. However, these pohtical shortcomings were all atoned 
for by his popularity as a military hero. The Whigs simply had 
to win. They shunned the danger of faction and defection by 
refusing to adopt any platform or declaration of principles. 
When the Ohio delegation attempted. to introduce the Wilmot 
Proviso they were rebuked. 

The New York Democrats were divided into the factions of 
"Barnburners" and "Hunkers," the former an antiadministra- 
tion group under the lead of Van Buren, with leanings toward 
the Wilmot Proviso. A convention of the Barnburners, joined 
by delegates from Massachusetts, Ohio, Connecticut, and Wis- 
consin, met at Utica, New York, in June, and nominated Van 
Buren for president. He was also nominated in August by the 
convention of the new Free Soil party, which met at Buffalo, 



442 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



attended by 65 delegates from 18 states. Their platform de- 
manded that Congress should neither erect another slave ter- 
ritory nor admit another slave state. It declared that the party 
would fight on and fight ever" under the banner inscribed 
^'Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men," until ^Hriumphant 
victory" should reward its exertions. The old Liberty (Abo- 
litionist) party merged with the Free-Soilers, its candidate, 
J. P. Hale, withdrawing in favor of Van Buren. The coalition 
of the Barnburners and the Free-Soilers was strong enough to 
defeat the regular Democratic candidate in the pivotal state of 
New York and to give the 36 electoral votes of that state, and 
therewith the election, to General Taylor.^ In Congress too the 
Free-Soilers won a commanding position, their 13 members 
holding the balance of power between the 112 Democrats and 
the 105 Whigs. 

Yet the election as a whole was without significance. It 
marked rather a dead center in the revolution of political events. 
The old issues of Bank, tariff, currency, internal improvements, 
were worn threadbare. The lines of the new struggle over 
slavery and the territories were not yet clearly drawn. Each 
party was looking for votes wherever they could be found — the 
Whigs with a Southern slaveholder whose military record com- 
mended him to the North; the Democrats with a Northern 
frontiersman whose views on slavery were not offensive to the 
South. Taylor carried seven free states and eight slave states ; 
Cass carried eight free states and seven slave states. The 
separation of the sections and the disruption of the old parties 
had not yet come. The election of 1848 was, as Garrison truly 
says, ^^a contest without an issue." ^ 

iThe popular vote in New York was 218,000 for Taylor, 120,000 for Van 
Buren, and 114,000 for Cass. In the electoral college Taylor had 163 votes to 
127 for Cass. 

2 Although the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, the Oregon settlement, 
and the rising controversy over slavery in the territories absorb the attention of 
the historical student in the middle years of the decade 1 840-1 850, there are 
a number of interesting facts of secondary importance in politics and civics 
that may be recorded here: (i) By an act of June 25, 1842, the "general 
ticket" was done away with for congressional elections, and each member was 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 443 



The Compromise of 1850 

National conventions might dodge the issue of slavery, crying 
" Avaunt and quit my sight ! 'Ho the Wilmot Proviso, which rose 
with the persistency of Banquo's ghost before their eyes ; Con- 
gress might adjourn, leaving the increasing population of New 
Mexico and California without a government; the new presi- 
dent, in his first inaugural message, might deprecate ^^the 
introduction of those exciting topics of a sectional character 
which have hitherto produced painful apprehensions in the 
public mind," — but all this was as futile as King Canute's 
injunction to the rising tide. The people at large were convinced 
that a crisis was at hand in the slavery question and that it must 
be met. Our country threatened to separate into warring fac- 
tions. The very protestations of orators North and South in 
their utter devotion to our priceless Union show how great the 
danger to that Union was. 

At the North the principle of the Wilmot Proviso was gain- 
ing converts with each rejection by Congress. Its advocates 
were determined that the acquisitions of the Mexican War 
should bring no profit to slavery. The abolitionists redoubled 
their efforts, planting new societies, establishing newspapers and 
debating clubs, and circulating a great amount of propagandist 
literature and pictures. Legislatures and conventions in the 
free states passed scores of resolutions upholding the Proviso, 
and petitions for its adoption poured in upon Congress in an 
unbroken stream. The South was equally firm in its opposition. 

returned to the House from a single congressional district. (2) In 1844 the 
electric telegraph was first used to report the proceedings of the national con- 
vention, and Silas Wright of New York had the unique experience of declining 
the presidential nomination when it was offered to him. (3) By an act of Jan- 
uary 23, 1845, a uniform day — the first Tuesday after the first Monday in 
November — was prescribed for the choosing of presidential electors. (4) In 
March, 1845, both Houses of Congress for the first time passed a bill over the 
president's veto. (5) On March 3, 1845, Iowa and Florida were authorized to 
frame constitutions for admission to the Union. (6) The Walker tariff of 1846 
began the series of relatively low tariff rates which lasted until the Civil War. 
(7) In August, 1846, the Independent Treasury system, which also lasted until 
the Civil War, was reestablished. 



444 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



An address was drawn up by Calhoun and signed by 48 members 
of Congress, demanding that aboHtionist agitation should cease, 
that fugitive slaves be returned to their masters, and that the 
new territory be freely opened to the emigration of the slave- 
holders. A mass meeting held in Kentucky requested Henry 
Clay to resign his seat in the Senate, because he had written a 
letter recommending a plan of gradual emancipation for the 
slaves of the state. Resolutions voted by a large majority in the 
legislature of Virginia declared that in the case of the adop- 
tion and attempted enforcement of the Wilmot Proviso ^Hhe 
sovereign people of Virginia" would not hesitate in the choice 
between abject submission to aggression and outrage" and 
determined resistance at all hazards and to the last extremity." 
The toast ^^a Southern confederacy" was hailed with cheers at 
a dinner to Senator Butler of South Carolina in April, 1849. As 
usual in times of great crises, the influence of the radicals on 
both sides tended to carry along the majority of the moderates, 
who in the North feared the reproach of favoring secession and 
in the South abhorred the suspicion of condoning abolition. 

When Polk's final Congress adjourned in the spring of 1849 
without having made any provision for the government of the 
territory acquired from Mexico, Senator Benton advised the 
Californians to form a government for themselves. There was 
pressing need for such action. Gold had been discovered in 
the Sacramento valley in January, 1848, and the next year saw 
the swarming of the ^^forty-niners" into California. Thousands 
came by wagon across the great plains of the West, braving star- 
vation, exhaustion, the fever of the alkali wastes, and the danger 
of Indian attacks and leaving their telltale track of broken 
wagons, dead animals, and human bones. Other thousands 
came by sea, enduring the perils and buffetings of the six 
months' voyage around Cape Horn, the mariners' Nemesis, or 
crossing the pestilence-laden Isthmus of Panama on pack mules, 
to battle like crazy men for a place on the dirty, crowded, rick- 
ety steamers plying up the Californian coast. Mexicans, South 
Americans, Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Chinamen 
rushed to the ^'diggings." Men fought over disputed claims 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 445 



with revolver and bowie knife. Bandits plundered the convoys, 
Indians raided the settlements, and drunken ruffians terrorized 
the camps. There was no law or order. As the American immi- 
grants gained in number over the ^'greasers" and the yellow men 
they determined to hold a convention for the establishment of a 
civil government. The convention met at Monterey, Septem- 
ber 3, 1849, framed a state constitution, excluding slavery 
by a unanimous vote, although one third of the members were 
from the Southern states. When Congress met in December, 
CaHfornia, its population grown from 6000 to over 80,000, was 
asking admission to the Union as a free state. The people of 
New Mexico, meanwhile, had petitioned for organization as a 
non-slaveholding territory, claiming land to the east of the 
Rio Grande over which Texas had extended her authority. 

President Taylor, although a Southerner and a slaveowner, 
became convinced on a visit to the New England states in the 
summer of 1849 that the South was the aggressor. He met 
the threats from South Carolina, Virginia, and Mississippi in the 
spirit of Andrew Jackson. He would answer the first overt act 
with a blockade of the Southern ports and call for volunteers 
from the free states. If necessary, he said, he ^Vould pour out 
his blood for the defense of the Union.'' He was much under 
the influence of Senator Seward of New York, the leader of 
the antislavery Whigs. While not an advocate of the Wilmot 
Proviso himself, the President let it be known that he would 
do nothing to encourage the program of the Southern radicals. 
^^The people of the North," he said in a speech in Pennsylvania, 
in August, 1849, ^^need have no apprehension of the further 
extension of slavery." His own plan was to admit California 
at once as a free state and establish territorial governments in 
New Mexico and Deseret (Utah) without any provision re- 
garding slavery, leaving the people the choice when they should 
be ready for statehood. 

The, latter doctrine was known as popular sovereignty," 
later nicknamed squatter sovereignty," because it left the for- 
mation of communities with or without slavery to the people who 
squatted," or settled, on the land while it was still the public 



446 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



territory of the nation, without the power of a state to deter- 
mine its municipal law by a regular constitution. The origin 
of the doctrine is generally ascribed to Lewis Cass, who elabo- 
rated it in a letter to a certain Mr. Nicholson of Nashville in 
December, 1847; but the principle had been discussed two 
years earlier in connection with the admission of the territory 
of Florida to statehood. Other possible solutions for the treat- 
ment of the territory acquired from Mexico were (i) the ap- 
plication of the Wilmot Proviso, excluding slavery by act of 
Congress; (2) the extension of the Missouri Compromise line 
of 36° 30' to the Pacific ; (3) the full protection, by the national 
government, of the ^'property rights" of the slaveholder in the 
common territory of the Union (the Calhoun-Davis theory) ; 
and (4) the reference of the legality of slavery to the territorial 
courts, with appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. 
The first of these solutions was, of course, that of the abo- 
litionists and the Free-Soilers of the North; the second was 
the original demand of the slavery advocates, soon, however, 
changed into the third ; the fourth was summarily disposed of 
by Corwin's sarcastic comment.^ 

But the organization of the new territory was not the only 
vexed question with which Congress would have to deal. North- 
ern agitators were persistently demanding the abolition of 
slavery and the slave trade in the national District of Columbia. 
Northern legislatures were passing Personal-Liberty Acts, mak- 
ing the rendition of fugitive slaves to their masters extremely 
difficult. The ^'underground railroad" was aiding hundreds of 
these fugitives from the border states to escape across the free 
soil of Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York to the 
Canadian border. And, finally, the legislatures, the press, the 
pulpits, the public platforms, of the South were insisting that 
the abolitionists must cease from their ^'taunts and insults," 
their self-righteous and meddling propaganda which encouraged 
servile insurrections, and must leave the South in peace to 
manage its own domestic institutions. 



iSee page 440, note. 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 447 



There was little likelihood that the Congress which met in 
December, 1849, would heed the President's admonition to 
^^abstain from those exciting topics of a sectional character'^ 
which had ^'produced painful apprehensions in the public mind." 
Even before the House was organized to receive President 
Taylor's message a three weeks' struggle between Howell Cobb 
of Georgia and Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts for the 
Speakership had revealed the bitterness of the sectional hos- 
tility. Amid hisses and applause men hurled defiance at each 
other across the aisle. Toombs of Georgia declared that if the 
North should exclude the slaveholder from New Mexico and 
California and ^^fix a national degradation on half the states of 
the Confederacy/' he for one was ready for disunion. Baker of 
Illinois sprang to his feet instantly with the retort that a dis- 
solution of this Union would be impossible ^^so long as an Amer- 
ican heart beat in an American bosom." Though the Whigs 
outnumbered the Democrats by 112 to 105, enough of the 
radical antislavery Whigs deserted the moderate Winthrop to 
give the Speakership to Cobb by the narrow margin of 102 votes 
to 100. In the Senate, where calmer counsels were supposed to 
prevail, resolutions on every one of the exciting topics" were 
introduced by Douglas, Benton, Foote, Mason, and Seward. It 
looked as if chaos would rule the session, when Henry Clay, the 
Nestor of the Senate, rose on January 29, 1850, to introduce a 
set of compromise resolutions to secure ^'the peace, concord, 
and harmony of the Union." 

After an absence of more than seven years Clay had been 
sent by a unanimous vote of the Kentucky legislature to re- 
sume his seat in the chamber which he had first entered in 
Jefferson's administration forty-three years before. He was 
now in his seventy-fourth year, and that tormenting ambition 
for the presidency which had shaped his course and some- 
times blurred his better judgment, since the exciting contest 
of 1824, was stilled. He came in the first place to hold up 
the hands of the last-elected Whig president, but still more to 
pour oil on the troubled waters of sectional strife. There were 
eight provisions in Clay's scheme of compromise : 



448 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



1. California should be admitted with her constitution as a 
free state. 

2. Territorial governments should be established in the rest 
of the Mexican cession, without restrictions as to slavery. 

3. The disputed boundary between Texas and New Mexico 
was determined. 

4. The public debt of Texas acquired before 1845 should be 
paid by the United States as an indemnity for the state's relin- 
quishment of her claims to a part of New Mexico. 

5. Slavery should not be abolished in the District of Colum- 
bia without the consent of Maryland and of the people of the 
District, or without direct compensation to the slave-owners. 

6. The slave trade should be prohibited in the District of 
Columbia. 

7. A more effective law should be passed for the rendition 
of fugitive slaves. 

8. Congress had no power to interfere with the slave trade 
between the states. 

On the fifth and sixth of February Clay defended his resolu- 
tions in the opening speech of the greatest debate that was ever 
heard in the halls of Congress. His body was racked with the 
consumptive's cough, and he was too weak to mount the steps of 
the Capitol without a supporting arm. But once on the floor of 
the Senate, his strength increased with his zeal as he spoke to the 
great throng that pressed on the doorways of the gallery to get 
within sound of his marvelous voice. His theme was conciliation. 
He was appalled" as he beheld in Congress and the legislatures 
of the states ^Hwenty-odd furnaces in full blast, emitting heat 
and passion and intemperance, and diffusing them throughout 
the whole extent of this broad land." What more could the 
North in fairness ask than what she had already got ? California 
was free soil. The table-lands of New Mexico would also un- 
doubtedly be free. The guaranty of nature was "worth a thou- 
sand Wilmot Provisos." Could not the South also be content if 
the new territory were not closed to the slaveholder, if her runa- 
way negroes were returned, and her "peculiar institution" were 
let alone in the slave states ? Clay held out the olive branch to 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 449 



"both parts of this distracted and unhappy country." No 
sacrifice was too great to preserve the Union of the Fathers. 
Secession could mean only war — war ferocious and bloody, im- 
placable and exterminating," out of which a Caesar or a Napo- 
leon might rise to put an end to self-government and crush 
the liberties of both the severed portions of this common 
empire." 

Calhoun spoke on the fourth of March. He too loved the 
Union and dreaded the word secession." But long study of 
refined philosophy on the rights of the states had convinced 
him that the Union as it existed was no longer a guaranty of the 
liberties of the South, and that the Constitution had been trans- 
formed by the interpretations of Northern majorities into an 
engine of repression and tyranny. Calhoun was in the last stages 
of consumption. He tottered into the Senate and sat wrapped 
in flannels, his sunken eyes half closed beneath their shaggy 
brows, the picture of a prophet of doom, while his colleague 
Mason read his last direful warning to the North. The time 
for compromise had passed. The bonds that held the Union 
together were snapping one by one. Already the churches 
North and South had parted company. Already Southern 
planters were boycotting Northern merchants. The North by 
its vicious abolitionist agitation, by its attempt to fix a stigma on 
the character of the slaveholder and deny him free access to 
the common territory of the Union, was driving the South out 
of that Union. The equilibrium between the sections was 
destroyed. For the moment free and slave states were equally 
represented in the Senate, but let California be admitted as a 
free state and the last semblance of equality would disappear. 
Only one remedy was left : let the North c^ase from her policy 
of aggrandizement. She alone was to blame. No institution of 
hers was attacked, no threat was made to destroy her political 
and economic order, no stigma was cast on her body of citizens. 
The South had nothing to compromise or concede. She asked 
only her rights under the Constitution. It lay with the North to 
decide whether those rights should be respected and the equi- 
librium between the sections restored. 



450 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Calhoun was terribly sincere as he spoke under the shadow 
of death ; and the events of the next decade proved the sound- 
ness of his judgment, as against that of the supporters of Clay's 
measures, that compromise could not finally settle the great con- 
troversy. In this he was closer to Lincoln and Seward, however 
strange the comparison may seem, than he was to Clay and 
Webster. But Calhoun's fatal error was the belief that the per- 
petuation and nationalization of slavery was the correct solution 
of the problem. The emancipation of the negro race meant for 
him the defiance of the ordinance of Providence, the economic 
ruin of the South, and the end of white supremacy — the cata- 
clysm of society. In the practical measures which he suggested 
for the restoration of harmony between the sections, Calhoun 
showed neither psychological nor political wisdom. His demand 
that the North stop agitating" the question of slavery was, as 
Lowell pointed out a decade later, equivalent to asking a man 
who has a fever to stop shaking. For it was slavery that was 
agitating the North, and not the North that was agitating 
slavery. As a political remedy Calhoun had nothing better to 
offer than the election of two presidents, one from the free and 
one from the slave states, each to have the veto power over all 
legislation of Congress. Thus, as Professor Dodd remarks, 
^'permanent deadlock was proposed as the remedy for sectional 
conflict." To match a country half slave and half free there was 
to be an executive half slave and half free.^ 

Three days after Calhoun's grave ultimatum was delivered 
Daniel Webster spoke. Again the floor and galleries of the 
Senate chamber were crowded, for Webster was the greatest of 
the American orators. His majestic presence was matched by 
a powerful intellect, and persuasion sat upon his lips. Addi- 
tional attraction was given to the occasion by the rumor that 
Webster was to make the effort of his life and by the uncertainty 
of opinion as to what course he would advocate. Clay was 

^This proposed amendment for a dual executive is not in Calhoun's speech 
of March 4, but is fully developed in a posthumous essay entitled "A Discourse 
on the Constitution and Government of the United States." 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 45^ 



committed to the Compromise ; Calhoun's opposition could be 
predicted from his public utterances and writings for a score of 
years past ; but what would Webster say ? Many of his friends 
in the North, citing his repeated declarations against the exten- 
sion of slavery, were sure that he would oppose the Compromise. 
Others believed that he would sacrifice consistency for the sake 
of preserving the Union. Others, still, with less generosity of 
judgment, thought that he would set conciliation above con- 
science, with the hope of uniting the great mass of conservatives 
North and South in the support of his candidature for the presi- 
dential nomination. No one can say just how the motives were 
mixed in Webster's mind as he rose with the words : ^^I wish to 
speak today not as a Massachusetts man nor as a Northern man, 
but as an American. ... I speak today for the preservation of 
the Union. ^Hear me for my cause.'" He supported the Com- 
promise measures at every point. As to California and New 
Mexico, he held that slavery was already excluded from those 
territories by the laws of physical geography, which made impos- 
sible in them the cultivation of the staple products of the South. 
He ^Vould not take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of 
nature nor to reenact the will of God." He ^Vould put in no 
Wilmot Proviso for the mere purpose of a taunt or a reproach." 
The aboHtionist societies he condemned as having produced 
nothing good or valuable in their operations for twenty years." 
The one real grievance of the South, he said, was the aid given by 
public and private agencies in the North to the fugitive slaves ; 
and in redressing this grievance he was willing, like Clay, to go 
to any reasonable lengths to secure the rights guaranteed to the 
South by the Constitution (Art. IV, sect. 2, par. 3). He closed 
with a magnificent peroration, warning his countrymen of the 
impossibility of ^'peaceful secession" and exhorting them to be 
faithful to the exalted trust of preserving the Union, the Consti- 
tution, and the harmony and peace of all who were destined to 
live under it. 

The Seventh-of -March speech brought Webster blame and 
praise unmeasured. For his Free Soil friends of the North, who 



452 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



had looked for a ringing denunciation of the extension of slavery 
^irrespective of parallels of latitude/' he had proved to be a 
broken reed and a shattered idol. Lucifer had fallen from 
heaven. It was enough that Webster was congratulated on his 
speech by Calhoun. Lowell spoke of his ^'mean and foohsh 
treachery." Whittier sang the dirge of his departed glory" 
in stanzas of gentle denunciation : 

So fallen ! So lost ! the light withdrawn 

Which once he wore ! 
The glory from his grey hairs gone 

Forevermore. 

Revile him not — the Tempter hath 

A snare for all. 
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, 

Befit his fall. 

On the other hand, the conservative business interests of the 
North and the great majority of the South approved of Web- 
ster's stand. A large sum of money was raised in Boston and 
New York for printing and circulating the speech, over 200,000 
copies of which were distributed. It was claimed that Webster, 
by his repudiation of the Wilmot Proviso, had held the Southern 
Whigs to the party and averted the imminent danger of dis- 
union. We need not have recourse to the severe judgment of 
Lowell and Whittier to explain Webster's position. He was 
never an abolitionist and hence could not be an apostate" from 
his creed. He was a conservative, with a great respect for 
property, a great reverence for the Constitution, and a great 
love for the Union. He saw the Union in danger and hastened 
to give assurances to the South. He saw the Constitution vio- 
lated, and advocated an adequate law to recover fugitive slaves. 
As for ^Hhe Tempter's snare," Webster was too good a politician 
to need to have Theodore Parker tell him that he would lose as 
many supporters in the North as he would gain in the South by 
his attack on the Proviso. The most sensible as well as the most 
charitable interpretation of his speech is that which he gave 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 



453 



himself: ^'I speak today for the preservation of the Union. 
^Hear me for my cause.' 

The great triumvirate of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, whose 
intelligence and eloquence had for a score of years graced the 
hall where they now met together for the last time, had spoken. 
Others followed, men of a later generation, who were less con- 
cerned with the legal and constitutional aspects of the case than 
with the settlement of a moral dilemma. Ex-Governor Seward 
of New York, a new member of the Senate, brushed aside the 
threats of disunion as ^'too trivial for serious notice." He too 
had reverence for the Constitution, but a Constitution which 
devoted our domain "to union, to justice, to defense, to welfare, 
and to liberty." He argued that the present generation held the 
fortunes of the country in trust for the future ; that slavery was 
an institution doomed to extinction by a "higher law" than the 
Constitution. Increasing the stringency of the fugitive-slave 
law would be of no avail, for the public sentiment of the North 
would resist its enforcement. Had any government ever suc- 
ceeded, he asked, in changing the moral convictions of its 
citizens by force? He was opposed to the Compromise. He 
would cooperate with the South in any reasonable plan to re- 
move slavery, but he would not agree on any terms to its 
extension. Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, a convert to the Free- 
Soilers from the Democratic ranks and also a new man in the 
Senate, spoke to the same purpose as Seward, but with a some- 
what more defiant attitude toward the South. The remaining 
speeches added nothing in the way of principle or argument. 

After several weeks of discussion the Senate reported the 
Compromise bill to a representative committee of 13, composed 
of Henry Clay as chairman and three members each from the 
Northern and the Southern Whigs and Democrats. Still there 
seemed to be no more immediate prospect of settlement at the 
opening of July than at the end of January. Seward's influence 

lEven his panegyrist Rhodes admits that Webster was lacking in apprecia- 
tion of the moral opposition to the extension of slavery into the new territory 
whether it could actually exist there or not (Vol. I, p. 153). Lincoln's position 
a decade later was dictated by higher principles. 



454 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



with President Taylor was strong, and the administration would 
do nothing to favor the bill. The importunity of the Southern 
Whigs only stiffened Taylor in his resistance. Death broke 
the deadlock. On July 9 President Taylor succumbed to an 
attack of acute cholera morbus and was succeeded by Millard 
Fillmore, of New York, who was a friend of the Compromise. 
One by one the measures were put through Congress in the 
months of August and September, the Fugitive Slave Law finally 
passing the House in a session from which some 30 Northern 
members absented themselves in a cowardly fashion. The 
Compromise in its final form did not differ essentially from 
the plan proposed by Clay in January. 

On the whole, it seems to the writer that the balance of 
favor inclined to the side of the South. The $10,000,000 paid 
to Texas for the relinquishment of territory to the east of the 
Rio Grande made that state a powerful factor in the later 
Confederacy. The new Fugitive Slave Act put the business of 
returning negroes into the hands of the federal government and 
encouraged its execution by favorable legislation. And the 
South won its contention for the entrance of the slaveholder 
into the new territory — the definite rejection of the Wilmot 
Proviso. On the other hand, the North secured the abolition 
of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and the admission 
of California as a free state. By the latter provision the balance 
between the free and the slave states, which had been main- 
tained in the Senate since the days of the Missouri Compromise, 
was broken, and both branches of Congress were controlled by 
the free-soil states. Henceforth there were no more slave states 
admitted to the Union. 

It is highly probable that the Compromise of 1850 postponed 
secession for a decade. By the advice of Calhoun a convention 
of Southern delegates had been called to meet at Nashville, 
Tennessee, in June. A number of radicals were determined to 
use the Nashville meeting for the publication of an ultimatum 
to the North. They believed that the moment for secession had 
come. But the strong pleas for union in the Senate and the 
reference of the Compromise measures to a mixed committee 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 455 



tempered the disunion sentiment in the South. A few weeks 
before the convention met, the National Intelligencer, the ad- 
ministration organ at Washington, canvassed the Southern press 
and found but 50 out of 300 newspapers in the slave states in 
favor of a radical program at Nashville — and of those 50 many- 
were ^^luke-warm" and backing down." The great majority 
of the people of the South favored waiting for the results of the 
debates on the Compromise before taking action. When, there- 
fore, the Nashville convention met in June, only nine states were 
represented, and 100 of the 176 delegates were from Tennessee. 
A small minority denounced compromise of any sort and de- 
clared that secession was inevitable; but the majority, after 
reasserting the doctrine that Congress had no power to exclude 
slavery from the territories of the United States and asking for 
the extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific 
(resolutions hardly consistent), voted to adjourn until after 
the session of Congress. A mere ^^rump" convention of 59 radi- 
cal members reassembled after the passage of the Compromise. 
It passed resolutions urging the assailed states" to adopt a 
policy of social and commercial boycott of the North. The South 
as a whole, however, accepted the Compromise heartily. Vir- 
ginia, which had been ready to advise secession if the Wilmot 
Proviso passed, declared herself satisfied and counseled her 
sister state of South Carolina ^Ho desist from any meditated 
secession on her part." The Missouri legislature condemned 
the Nashville convention as ^Hending to foment discord and 
alienate one part of the confederation from the other." 
A convention in Georgia declared that it would "abide by the 
Compromise as a permanent adjustment of the sectional con- 
troversy." The administration paper at Washington said that 
it "could fill a double sheet of 48 columns with extracts of joy 
and gratulations" from Southern and Western journals alone 
on the success of the Compromise measures. 

The cause for this general "joy and gratulation," which for 
the moment overbalanced disunion sentiment in even South 
Carolina and Mississippi, is to be found, no doubt, partly in the 
relief from the tension of the summer's struggle over the bills. 



456 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



But the chief cause was the assurance given by Webster and 
Clay to the Union men of the South that the majority of the 
nation was ready to allow the slaveholder his constitutional 
rights. The indorsement of Webster's speech by the solid 
citizens" of the New England and Middle Atlantic States was 
welcomed by the South as a rebuke to the abolitionists ; while 
Clay, by his indefatigable labor, his tact and his charm, won 
over the Southern Whigs and the Westerners to the cause of 
union under the Compromise, leaving the radical South iso- 
lated.^ It was the last and crowning service of the great 
pacificator" to the cause of the Union. It is never permissible 
for the historian to say what would have happened in any in- 
stance had other counsels prevailed. But if secession had come 
in 1850 instead of in i860, two things seem almost certain: 
first, that the North, not yet convinced of the extent of the 
slaveholders' demands^ would have been more ready to ac- 
quiesce in the peaceful separation of the sections ; and, second, 
that if war had come, the North would have had a far smaller 
margin of superiority in wealth, population, and resources. 

The Compromise of 1850 was hailed as the final settlement 
of the slavery question. By the Missouri Compromise of 1820, 
the admission of Texas as a slave state in 1845, the erection of 
the free territory of Oregon in 1848, and the compromise meas- 
ures of 1850 the status of slavery had been determined in every 
square mile of our domain from the Mississippi to the Pacific. 
When Congress met in December, 1850, Clay secured the signa- 
tures of 40 members to a paper declaring that they would 
support no man for public office who refused to abide by the 
Compromise. If only North and South would carry out the 
pact faithfully, there seemed to be no need for further trouble. 

There was, however, one very disquieting element in the 
situation. In spite of pleas of men like Webster and Choate in 
the East and Cass and Douglas in the West, the people north 
of Mason and Dixon's line would not submit to the enforcement 

1 Professor Dodd, in his "Expansion and Conflict," suggestively compares this 
method of Clay's to that "by which Jackson defeated Calhoun in 1833" on the 
nullification issue. 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 



457 



of the new Fugitive Slave Act. Of course, the abolitionists, who 
set their moral convictions above the law, were opposed to the 
return of any escaped slave, but the provisions of the new law 
made it odious in the eyes of thousands of moderates also. It 
was so heavily weighted against the fugitive that not even the 
free negro of the North could feel secure. No jury trial was 
allowed to the negro claimed as a fugitive. Master or agent 
had simply to present an affidavit before a United States judge 
or a commissioner, whose fee was doubled if he decided in favor 
of the claimant. The whole community was bound by the law 
to come to the aid of the commissioner as a posse comitatus to 
prevent the rescue or escape of the condemned fugitive, and 
the United States marshal was liable to a fine of liooo and a 
civil suit for the value of the slave in case the latter got away 
or was rescued. Finally, the law was ex post facto (and therefore 
unconstitutional) in that it applied to slaves who had fled from 
their masters at any time — even years before. In the face of 
such a law it was inevitable that the ^'underground railroad" 
should redouble its activity, that citizens should refuse to come 
to the aid of the slave-catcher, and that negroes should be 
rescued from jails and courthouses and smuggled over the 
border into Canada. Mass meetings in the North condemned 
the act in language as strong and '^seditious" as that used by 
the South against the Wilmot Proviso. They declared the act 
"null and void" and registered their intention to "make it 
powerless in the country" by an "absolute refusal to obey its 
inhuman and diabolical provisions." 

Southern extremists too, in spite of their discomfiture at 
the Nashville convention and the manifest strength of the 
unionist sentiment in the elections of 1851^ kept up the agita- 
tion for disunion. Governor Quitman of Mississippi, Yancey 
of Alabama, Rhett of South Carolina, and Bell of Texas were 
prominent in this movement. "Southern Rights" associations 
were formed, one in Alabama calling for a new Southern party 
and announcing that the state would follow any other Southern 
state into secession. But the extremists, both Northern nulli- 
fiers and Southern secessionists, were repressed by the moder- 



/ 



458 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

ates as a dwindling group of irreconcilables. ^'The law will be 
upheld/' declared Cass, ^'wherever the flag of the Union waves." 
In a word, the great majority of both sections were determined 
that the Compromise should be a finality. 

The only hope for this was the preservation of the two great 
political parties as national organizations and the avoidance of 
their polarization into a Southern Rights party and a Free Soil 
party. Hence, in the campaign of 1852 both parties stood on the 
platform of the finality of the Compromise. There was no other 
important national issue, and it became simply a question as to 
which party could show the more cohesive organization and 
inspire the greater confidence in its fidehty to the common plat- 
form. Since the great Whig leaders Clay and Webster had been 
the champions of the Compromise, and the Whig president 
Fillmore had facilitated its passage, it would seem as if the 
Whigs should have been intrusted with its execution. But the 
Whig party was no longer the party of Henry Clay, who was on 
his deathbed when its convention met in June, 1852, and it 
had never been the party of Daniel Webster. Since the Mexican 
War the antislavery sentiment in its ranks had been steadily 
growing, as the influence of Seward testifies. Had the con- 
vention nominated either Fillmore or Webster, the Southern 
wing of the party would have been content ; but the Fillmore 
and Webster forces refused to combine, and General Winfield 
Scott was nominated on the fifty-third ballot. The Whigs had 
won two elections with a military candidate, and now they 
hoped to repeat the triumphs of '40 and '48 with the ^'hero of 
Lundy 's Lane and Chapultepec." But Scott was Seward's candi- 
date and was suspected of a tincture of Free Soil principles. 
Leading Southern Whigs, like Toombs and Stephens, bolted 
the ticket. The result was the overwhelming election of Frank- 
lin Pierce of New Hampshire, whom the Democrats had nomi- 
nated after a long struggle in their convention between Douglas, 
Cass, Marcy, and Buchanan. Pierce carried every state in the 
Union except Vermont, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Ten- 
nessee, receiving 254 electoral votes to 42 for Scott. He was 
an amiable, colorless, and thoroughly ^^safe" man, pledged to 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 459 



respect the Compromise of 1850. His election appeared to be 
the triumph of conciHation/ for the Free Soil vote of the North, 
which had been the determining factor in the two previous 
elections, shrank from 291,263 to 155,825. A less-noticed but 
more ominous fact was the decline of the Whig vote in the 
seven cotton states of the South ^ from 138,369 to 81,775. The 
disintegration of the great Whig party had begun. 

For the sake of following the crisis of 1850 to its logical 
conclusion, we have passed over important and interesting dip- 
lomatic events of the mid-century, which must claim our atten- 
tion at the close of this chapter. The year of Taylor's election 
was a year of general revolution in Europe. The French over- 
threw the Orleans dynasty and established the Second Republic. 
Liberal forces in the Italian states either drove out their Aus- 
trian despots or curbed them by written constitutions. The 
Prussian king, after revolution in the streets of Berlin, called an 
assembly to frame a constitution. Prince Metternich, who for 
a generation had been the leader of reaction in Europe, was 
forced to flee from Vienna, and the Hungarians rose in revolt 
against the domination of Austria, which they had endured for 
three centuries. The United States were in hearty sympathy 
with these democratic revolutions in Europe. Taylor sent an 
envoy to Austria in 1849 with instructions to recognize the 
Hungarian Republic as soon as it should be established. The 
mission proved futile, for Russian troops came to the aid of 
Austria in the ruthless suppression of the Hungarian revolt. 

When the Austrian charge d'affaires at Washington, the Che- 
valier Huelsemann, protested against the unfriendly behavior 
of our government, he was answered by Fillmore's Secretary of 
State, Daniel Webster (December 13, 1850), in a letter which 
did justice to the mid-century spirit of spread-eagleism. '^ 

say "appeared," because a vote in the House (April 5, 1852) on the reso- 
lution that the Compromise should be accepted as a final settlement of the 
slavery question was carried by only 103 votes to 74. 

2 Namely: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and 
Texas. The electors of South Carolina were chosen by the legislature of the 
state until after the Civil War. 



46o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Webster dwelt on the achievements of the American republic, 
its economic prosperity and political liberty, its commanding 
place among the nations, its power spread out over a region 
. . . in comparison with which the possessions of the House 
of Hapsburg [were] but a patch on the earth's surface." The 
American people could not ^^fail to cherish always a lively 
interest in the fortunes of nations struggling for institutions 
like their own." Webster acknowledged that his boastful and 
rough" letter was written more for home consumption than for 
Austria's correction. It was a contribution to the ^'finality" 
of the newly passed Compromise of 1850. The author of the 
Seventh-of -March speech wrote the letter of the thirteenth 
of December to touch the nation's pride and make a man 
look sheepish and silly who should speak of disunion." Even 
Mr. Rhodes, Webster's stoutest champion, admits that the 
letter was ^'hardly more than a stump speech under diplo- 
matic disguise" (Vol. I, p. 206). 

Louis Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian revolution, 
eluded the vengeance of Austria and took refuge in Turkey, 
whence he was brought to the United States. From the day 
of his arrival in New York, in December, 1851, to the day of 
his departure the next summer, he received a constant though 
waning ovation as he traveled through the states east of the 
Mississippi River. His impassioned pleas for downtrodden 
Hungary gave large audiences ample opportunity to relieve by 
tumultuous applause feelings which had been raised to the 
highest pitch of excitement over the slavery controversy. But 
when Kossuth came to reckon up the actual cash contributed 
to the cause of Hungarian freedom, he was sorely disappointed. 
He had collected less than Si 00,000. More had been spent on 
banquets and parades in his honor. Kossuth was formally re- 
ceived by both Houses of Congress and dined at the President's 
table, but the government was careful not to commit itself 
to any intervention in European affairs. 

The other side of the Monroe Doctrine — namely, the pro- 
tection of the American continent against the encroachments 
of European powers — was also a lively interest in the middle 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 461 



years of the century. We have already seen (p. 415) what a 
large part the threat of such encroachment played in the Texan 
negotiations. Immediately after the Mexican War a critical 
situation arose in Central America. The British had estab- 
lished a protectorate over the Mosquito Indians of Nicaragua 
in the seventeenth century. In spite of the protests of Spain, 
and of the Central American republics after they had thrown 
off the yoke of Spain, Great Britain held on persistently and 
extended her authority until it covered most of the coast below 
the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan and the Isthmus of Panama. 
Our acquisition of California and Oregon had suddenly brought 
us to the Pacific, making the control of Central America, where 
for centuries canal routes had been projected, a point of vital 
interest. When British warships entered the San Juan River 
in Nicaragua and took possession of the fort of Greytown, in 
January, 1848, there was heated discussion in Congress on the 
question of our intervention. President Polk announced his 
firm determination to uphold the Monroe Doctrine (April, 
1848). A few weeks later the President sent Elijah Rise as 
special envoy to Guatemala to cultivate more friendly rela- 
tions with the Central American states," and the Senate ratified 
a treaty with New Granada (now Colombia) which had been 
pending for two years, giving the United States right of way 
across the isthmus for road, railroad, or canal construction. 
Early in 1849 Hise negotiated treaties with Nicaragua and 
Honduras for the right of transit across those republics. Great 
Britain and the United States, each apprehending the other's 
desire to control Central America, engaged in tart diplomatic 
controversy, and each sought to seize a point of vantage in the 
region. They came to an agreement when Sir Henry Lytton 
Bulwer, who arrived in Washington at the close of the year 1849 
as envoy extraordinary, suggested that the countries stop bick- 
ering over spheres of influence in Central America and agree on 
a common policy for a canal. 

Taylor's Secretary of State^ John M. Clayton, forthwith 
entered into negotiations with Sir Henry. On April 19, 1850, 
a treaty was signed, and on July 4 the ratifications of the two 



462 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

governments were exchanged. The famous Clayton-Bulwer 
Treaty ^'for facilitating and protecting the construction of a 
ship canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans" pledged 
the two governments never to obtain exclusive control over such 
a canal, nor to erect fortifications commanding it, nor to colonize 
or acquire dominion over any part of Central America. They 
were to protect any company that should build a canal and 
to guarantee the neutrality of the canal when built. It was to 
be maintained "for the benefit of mankind on equal terms to 
all." In spite of the liberal terms of the treaty, trouble be- 
tween the United States and Great Britain in Central America 
was not ended. Great Britain still held on to the Mosquito 
protectorate and Belize, and even annexed some islands off the 
coast of Honduras (1852). A British man-of-war fired on a 
steamer of the American Transport Company which refused 
to pay duties to the Mosquito government; and a year later 
an American vessel bombarded and destroyed the port of Grey- 
town, where a mob had attacked the American consul. Had it 
not been for the rise of more important questions for both 
governments in 1854 — the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the 
Crimean War — the Central American issue might not have 
sunk so suddenly into insignificance. 

A third topic of diplomatic interest in the mid-century was 
the attempt of certain people in the South to get possession, by 
fair means or foul, of the island of Cuba. Ever since the days 
of Thomas Jefferson there had been prophecies by the expan- 
sionists that "the pearl of the Antilles" must eventually be 
ours. At any rate, as our interest in the Gulf of Mexico grew 
through the acquisition of Louisiana, the cession of Florida, 
and the annexation of Texas, it became more and more obvious 
that the great island guarding the entrance to the Gulf must 
not be allowed to pass into the hands of a strong European 
power. When lands for the profitable employment of slave 
labor were growing scarcer and the balance of power of the free 
and the slave states in the Senate was broken, additional motives 
for the acquisition of Cuba were furnished. The island would 
make five fertile slave states, which would add ten members to 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 



463 



the United States Senate. The ardent annexationist Polk had 
ordered the American representative at Madrid to sound the 
Spanish government on the sale of Cuba for $100,000,000, only 
to be met with the reply that rather than see the island trans- 
ferred to any power [Spain] would prefer seeing it sunk in the 
ocean." The way of legitimate acquisition being closed, filibus- 
tering took its place. A Venezuelan adventurer named Lopez, 
who had lived in Havana, conceived the idea of ^^iberating" 
Cuba from Spanish rule. So popular was the project with the 
young men of the South that the government at Washington 
seemed powerless to enforce the neutrality laws. Meetings of 
sympathy with the filibusterers were held in Nashville, Balti- 
more, Cincinnati, and even in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and New 
York. Lopez had the encouragement of important men like 
Calhoun, Governor Quitman, and Jefferson Davis. He repre- 
sented that ^^all Cuba was ripe for revolution" and that ^^the 
officers of the Cuban army had given written pledges to join the 
invaders." A first descent on Cuba in the spring of 1850 failed ; 
but Lopez found his way back to New Orleans, where, after 
being acquitted of the charge of having violated the neutrality 
laws, he gathered a new expedition of nearly 500 men, com- 
prising members of some of the best families of the South. 
Colonel Crittenden, the nephew of the Attorney-General of the 
United States, was second in command. Again the expedition 
proved disastrous (August, 1851). The invaders found no wel- 
coming band of revolutionists in Cuba. Both Lopez, who had 
marched into the interior of the island, and Crittenden, who 
had remained on the coast, were captured and executed. Only 
a few men escaped. Those who were not killed in the skir- 
mishes or who had not died of fatigue, fever, and starvation 
were taken prisoners, and of these over 150, most of them 
American citizens, were sent to Spain, ostensibly to be put to 
work in the mines. 

When the news of the failure of the second Lopez expedition, 
with the cruel punishment of the victims, reached New Orleans, 
the people broke out into a riot. They wrecked the office of 
a Spanish newspaper, destroyed Spanish shops, mobbed the 



464 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Spanish consulate, defaced the portrait of the queen, and tore 
down the Spanish flag and burned it in a bonfire in the pub- 
lic square. Secretary of State Webster could do no less than 
apologize to Spain for the insult to her flag and frankly acknowl- 
edge the outrage which ^Vas committed in the heat of blood.'' 
He assured the Spanish government that when a new consul 
should be sent to New Orleans, the flag of his ship would be 
saluted ^'as a demonstration of respect" and an apology ^^for 
the grave injustice done to his predecessor." 

The Lopez incident was thus closed, but there was no modi- 
fication in the South either of the resentment against Spain or 
of the desire for Cuba. President Pierce, who asserted in his 
inaugural address that he would not be ^'controlled by any 
timid forebodings of evil from expansion," seemed deliberately 
to invite an issue with Spain over Cuba by his appointment 
of Pierre Soule of Louisiana as minister to the court of Madrid. 
Soule had advocated the annexation of Cuba in the United 
States Senate and had spoken of the ^'heroic" Lopez and Crit- 
tenden as deserving ^Hhe praise that is freely accorded to 
Lafayette and Kosciusko." Even on his way to Spain, where 
it was intimated in the press that he would not be persona 
grata, he addressed a deputation of Cuban exiles and spoke of 
^'the tyrants of the Old World." Soon after his arrival in 
Madrid an American merchant steamer, the Black Warrior, 
was seized by the authorities of the port of Havana (on the 
ground that her captain had violated an obsolete harbor regu- 
lation) and her cargo of cotton confiscated. Instructed to pre- 
sent our grievances to the court of Madrid, Soule, in his excess 
of zeal, delivered an ultimatum. Unless reparation should be 
made within forty-eight hours, he said, he would ask for his pass- 
ports. Secretary Marcy did not support Soule in his extrava- 
gant demand, but ordered him to confer with Buchanan and 
Mason, our ministers to Great Britain and France respectively, 
on the best policy for our government to pursue in regard to 
Spain and Cuba. 

The ministers met at Ostend, in the Netherlands, in the 
summer of 1854. Buchanan and Mason were both annexation- 



THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 465 



ists, though more moderate than Soule. They had both been 
members of Polk's cabinet, Buchanan as Secretary of State hav- 
ing made Spain the $100,000,000 offer for Cuba. Now, under 
the spur of the impetuous Soule, they drew up the famous Os- 
tend Manifesto. This remarkable document, after rehearsing 
the reasons why Cuba should belong to the United States, con- 
cluded with the statement that ^4f Spain, dead to the voice of 
her own interests and moved by pride and a false sense of 
honor, refused to sell Cuba/' then, if her possession of the 
island endangered the peace and existence of our Union," we 
should be justified ^^by every law human and divine" in taking 
it from her. Now was the moment, said Soule, when France 
and Great Britain were involved in the Crimean War, for the 
United States to force Spain to yield up the pearl of the Antilles. 
It would be a great stroke of fortune for the slave interests 
of the South. 

But a new situation had arisen in the United States. The 
battle between freedom and slavery in the Western territory had 
been reopened after four years of troubled truce. The cautious 
Marcy repudiated the Ostend Manifesto and forced Soule's 
resignation by a dispatch of withering sarcasm. The Cuban 
incident was closed,^ and the dreams of the Southern expan- 
sionists, roseate for a moment, were rudely broken by the voice 
of Stephen A. Douglas. 

iln the summer of 1855 we quietly accepted Spain's tardy apology for the 
seizure of the Black Warrior. 



CHAPTER IX 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 

Unsettled questions have no pity for the repose of a nation. 

James A. Garfield 

The Business Man's Peace 

Confidence surrounded the handsome head of Franklin Pierce 
like an aureole as he stood before the throng at the eastern 
portico of the Capitol, on March 5, 1853, to deliver his in- 
augural address. His mandate to guide the American nation 
was the clearest since Jackson's triumphant election exactly a 
quarter of a century before. Conciliation was the platform on 
which he had run ; harmony was the burden of his message. 
He spoke of the faith of the fathers in the destiny of our nation 
and congratulated the country on a steady expansion which 
had nearly trebled the stars in our banner. He gave comfort 
to the men who were casting longing eyes on Cuba and Nic- 
aragua by the assertion that his administration would ^^not be 
controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion." 
But at the same time he protested that ^^no blot should be 
suffered to mar our fair record," no act tolerated that could 
not "challenge a ready justification before the tribunal of the 
world." The Compromise measures of 1850, he declared, were 
"strictly constitutional and to be unhesitatingly carried into 
effect." The "perilous crisis" was safely passed, the slavery 
question was "at rest." He fervently hoped that no sectional 
ambition or fanatical excitement might again "threaten the 
durability of our institutions or obscure the light of our 
prosperity." 

Yet, in spite of the new president's assurances, there was 
something ominous in both his words and his deeds. He leaned 

466 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 467 



visibly toward the South. He emphasized the constitutionality 
of ^involuntary servitude" and called for a cheerful" exe- 
cution of the Fugitive-Slave Law. He had no word of rebuke 
for the fire-eaters" of the Nashville convention, but threat- 
ened a "stern resistance" to the "morbid enthusiasm" of the 
abolitionists. His cabinet was almost wholly proslavery in 
its sympathies. The most influential member, Jefferson Davis, 
Secretary of War, was notoriously dissatisfied with the great 
compromise on which the administration claimed to rest. Not 
a man of antislavery views was sent abroad to represent the 
United States. Soule and Mason, who went to Madrid and 
Paris respectively, were intense proslavery men, keen for the 
acquisition of Cuba. Buchanan, who was sent to the court of 
St. James, had pointed out to Pierce in 1852 that the president 
who secured the cession of Cuba would "render his name illus- 
trious and place it on the same level with that of his great 
predecessor who gave Louisiana to the Union." Part of the 
results of the President's devotion to these Southern interests 
we have already seen in our last chapter; others will appear 
as our story proceeds in the next section. Here we must pause 
to consider the economic state of our country in the middle of 
the century. 

When Pierce spoke of "the light of our prosperity," he 
struck the true note of the Compromise of 1850. It was a 
business man's peace. The country was tired of the protracted 
strife over slavery, which Benton had complained of, thirty 
years before, as infesting our public life like the plague of frogs 
in Egypt. The generation which had been vexed with the 
agitation over gag resolutions, the annexation of Texas, and 
the Wilmot Proviso witnessed at the same time a remarkable 
growth in the population and wealth of the United States. The 
census of 1850 was the first of those elaborate compilations 
which furnish the data not alone of our territory and population 
but of the moral, social, and industrial condition of our people 
as well — their religion and education, their newspapers and 
libraries, their charities and crimes, their occupations, wages, 
and profits, the yield of their fields and factories, the revenues 



468 THE UNITED STATES OF AIMERICA 



from their realty and commerce. The census of 1 8 50 was at once 
an indorsement and a challenge. It justified the experiment of 
threescore years of political democracy, and it stimulated faith 
in the greater destinies awaiting the American republic. Long- 
fellow's ''Building of the Ship" was its dedication ode. 

Our population had grown from a seaboard people of 3,929,- 
214, when the first census was taken in 1790, to a continental 
people of 23,191,876. In 1790 we were equal in population 
to only the tiniest powers in Europe, but by 1850 we had out- 
distanced them all except Russia, Great Britain, Austria, and 
France. The states of the Atlantic slope still held the major- 
ity of our people, but only by a narrow margin. More than 
10,000,000. of our 23,000,000 were living in the great central 
basin of the Mississippi, with a scant 120,000 in California and 
Oregon. The greatest acceleration of growth was in the old 
Northwest Territory of 1787 and beyond the Mississippi in 
the new state of Iowa and territory of INIinnesota. While the 
East increased but 10 per cent in population in the period of 
1 830-1 8 50, and the South (including the new cotton lands of 
the lower IMississippi Valley) increased 40 per cent, the North- 
west grew over 75 per cent in this score of years. This increase 
was due almost wholly to the rapid reproduction of our na- 
tive stock, w^hich was 90 per cent of British extraction at the 
time of Washington's inauguration. Early marriages and large 
families were the rule, especially on the frontier, where home- 
steads were easy to get and sons and daughters grew up to a 
life of wholesome toil crowned by the clearing of their own 
new farms still farther west. 

No record was kept of the arrival of immigrants in America 
until Congress, by a law of 1819; required the collectors of 
customs in our ports to file with the Secretary of State the age, 
sex, occupation, and country of all foreign passengers landing 
in their districts. From the lists kept in the imperfect execu- 
tion of this law it appears that during the decade 182 0-1830 
about 140,000 immigrants were added to the 200,000 who were 
estimated to have come since the foundation of our Republic. 
This insignificant immigration shot up, however, to 600,000 in 



THE HOUSE DIVlbED AGAINST ITSELF 469 



the decade 1 830-1 840 and to 1,700,000 in the following ten- 
year period. By the middle of the century some 2,800,000 
(or 12 per cent) of our population were foreign-born. The 
causes of this recent influx of immigrants lay partly in un- 
toward events in Europe and partly in attractive conditions in 
America. Political revolutions in 1830 on the continent of 
Europe broke the unstable peace which had followed the 
Napoleonic upheaval, and the introduction of the Industrial 
Revolution caused widespread disturbances in the field of labor. 
A total failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1845, followed 
by a blight which destroyed the plants entirely the next year, 
brought the Emerald Isle to a pitiable state of famine and sent 
hundreds of thousands of her starving people to our shores. 
And, finally, the great revolutionary year of 1848 convulsed 
Europe from the Pyrenees to the Balkans. America was the 
Mecca for the destitute peasant and the exiled patriot. The 
leveling of the privileges of wealth, creed, and family by the 
spread of the Jacksonian democracy assured the immigrant 
welcome into a political fellowship in the New World. The 
expanding mills and factories of the East absorbed the labor of 
thousands; other thousands joined contractors' gangs to work 
on the newly projected canals and railroads; while the bound- 
less lands of the West called the adventurous pioneer and the 
thrifty peasant, for whom life was not worth living unless he 
could see the sun rise and set on his orchards and grasslands. 

About 300,000 immigrants came to America in the sin- 
gle year 1848 — chiefly Germans and Irish. The former were 
land-lovers and set out for the Middle West, sometimes, unfortu- 
nately, lured to barren regions ^'on the faith of a lying pro- 
spectus," but generally following the line of instructions which 
were already appearing in the excellent guidebooks published 
in their home country. By the census of 1850 there were over 
80,000 Germans in the states of the Northwest. The popu- 
lation of Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Chicago still 
testifies to the great migration from the Fatherland in the mid- 
century. The Irish, on the other hand, remained for the most 
part in the cities on the Atlantic coast, where they soon dis- 



470 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



played that aptitude for ''practical" politics which has made 
the name of Tammany Hall at once a marvel and a byword. 
New York City alone had 133,000 Irish immigrants in 1850. 
Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and the other coast cities fol- 
lowed according to their capacity, while many a New England 
town had its ''Irish village." 

The influx of large numbers of foreigners gave rise to serious 
political and social problems. Corruption and machine politics, 
lavish bribery in elections, a debased press pandering to prej- 
udice and passion, to religious bigotry and race hatred, ap- 
peared in many quarters to an alarming degree. A bitter 
persecution was directed against the Irish, who, before the 
large influx of Italians and Poles, formed the bulk of our 
Roman Catholic immigrants. A "Native American" movement 
developed to combat the influence of the Catholic Church 
in our politics and to resist the efforts of that church to se- 
cure a share of the public funds for the support of its paro- 
chial schools. As early as 1834 a convent occupied by the 
Ursuline Sisters near Boston had been sacked and burned. 
Anti-Catholic rioters in New York attacked churches and 
dwellings in 1842, smashing the windows of the episcopal resi- 
dence of Archbishop Hughes. Two years later the "Nativists" 
organized in the wards of Philadelphia for a systematic war 
against the Roman Catholics, declaring that "Popery" was 
"incompatible with free institutions." Excited men rushed out 
from heated mass meetings to attack the Irish in the streets. 
Catholic churches, schools, and shops were set on fire. The 
militia was called out three times before the riot was finally 
quelled, after the destruction of thousands of dollars' worth of 
property and the loss of a score of lives. The increased immi- 
gration of the later forties only added fuel to the flames. In 
1850 the Nativists formed the order of the "Star-Spangled Ban- 
ner," which grew within five years into the powerful political 
party of the "Know-Nothings," or "Native Americans,"^ elect- 

iThe party had secret grips and passwords, like the Masonic lodges. When 
asked about it the members were ordered to reply, " I know nothing." We shall 
notice the political influence of the party in the next section. 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 471 



ing governors and controlling legislatures in several of the states 
of the Union. 

The boiling over of the ^'melting-pot/' however, was after all 
only a sign of trifling disorder in the midst of the general pros- 
perity in the America of 1850. Capital was abundant, and new 
opportunities for investment were opening on every hand. The 
discovery of gold in CaHfornia in 1848, followed in 1851 by the 
uncovering of large gold deposits in Australia, provided an ample 
specie basis for a circulating medium proportioned to a rapidly 
expanding volume of business. Statistics carefully gathered for 
the first time in the census of 1850 showed that manufactures 
had already passed agricultural products in value, the respective 
figures for the year being $1,055,51 1,000 and $994,000,000. In 
the industrial region bounded roughly west and south by the 
Wabash, the Ohio, and the Potomac Rivers the number of mill 
and factory operatives was increasing by tens of thousands 
yearly. The annual production of flour and meal exceeded 
$100,000,000; cotton goods, lumber, and shoes each passed 
the $50,000,000 mark; and the value of leather, woolens, 
and machinery manufactured was between $25,000,000 and 
$50,000,000. The age of small production, supplying narrow 
local markets and preserving something still of the apprentice 
system, was definitely over. The extension of railroad-building, 
the use of anthracite coal for smelting,^ low tariffs,^ a swell- 
ing merchant marine^ unbounded confidence and inventive 

1 There were but six anthracite furnaces in 1840. Fifteen years later the 
number had grown to 120, and anthracite had displaced charcoal as the chief 
smel ting-fuel. Until 1844 we imported the rails for our 4000 miles of railroad 
from Europe, and in the year 1850 we turned out but 85,000 tons of iron. Before 
the close of Pierce's administration (1857) we were producing 180,000 tons 
annually. More than half of this product came from the Pennsylvania foundries. 

2 From the second war with England to the Mexican War the condition of 
the United States Treasury was fluctuating. A disordered currency, tariff con- 
troversies, wild speculation in public lands, and reckless state banking kept the 
public finances continuously disturbed. But after 1846 they steadied down. 
Prices of staples, like cotton and wheat, became more regular. Business gained 
confidence. A surplus of from $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 came into the Treasury 
annually under the Walker tariff of 1846 (the first of our modern "scientific" 
tariffs, with divisions into schedules). 



472 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



ingenuity/ were some of the chief elements in our economic 
prosperity in the decade following the Compromise measures 
of 1850. 

Although this period saw the transition from small manu- 
factures to large-scale production, it was not yet marked by 
those glaring inequalities of wealth which characterize the in- 
dustrial world in this later age of the soulless corporation." 
Comfort, if not wealth, was widespread. Neither the capitalist 
at one end of the economic scale nor the laborer at the other end 
was so far removed in condition from the general public as to re- 
gard himself as a member of a class" whose special interest 
must be savagely fought for at whatever expense to the ultimate 
consumer. A distinguished European engineer who traveled 
through the industrial parts of our country a few years before 
the Civil War was impressed with ^'the wide expanse and abun- 
dant resources" of the United States, but much more with the 
"absence of pauperism." "Nothing is more striking to a Eu- 
ropean," he wrote, "than the universal appearance of respecta- 
bility of all classes in America. You see no rags, you meet 
no beggars." 

Manufactures and shipping made the prosperity of the North. 
The West with its boundless lands was developing a varied agri- 
culture, supplying food to the plantations of the South and raw 
wool and hemp to the factories of the East. Cotton was the 
wealth of the South. Year after year this staple had been in- 
creasing at the expense of farm products in the older states of 
the South and monopolizing the newly opened lands of the Gulf 
shore and the lower Mississippi Valley. The crop grew from 
1,500,000 bales in 1840 to 2,500,000 bales in 1850. In the next 
decade it increased to 5,000,000 bales — seven eighths of the 
world's supply. But even this enormous yield did not fully meet 

^The record of the Patent Office is a good index of American prosperity. 
During the first generation of our national history, patents averaged less than 
150 a year. They grew to 544 by 1830, and the decade 1840-1850 saw the 
patenting of 5942 new American inventions, including the steam hammer, the 
sewing-machine, the telegraph, and the rotary press. In the decade 1850-1860 
the patents jumped to 23,140, a number now exceeded every year, 



rHE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 



473 



the demands of the factories of Europe and the New England 
States. The average production per slave rose from 109 pounds 
in 1820 to 325 pounds in 1850. The steady trend of the negro 
population to the lower South/ an increase of 100 per cent in the 
price of sound field hands," and the persistent effort of the great 
planters to reopen the African slave trade all show how com- 
pletely the cotton interests dominated the life of the Southland. 
The section was an economic unit. Because the raw cotton sent 
abroad in 1850 constituted nearly 50 per cent of the exports of 
the United States,^ and the bills of exchange were largely paid 
in imports to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, 
the Southerners maintained that it was their plantations that 
were enriching the country. '^Cotton is King! " they said. ^^In 
the 3,000,000 bags of cotton that slave labor annually throws 
upon the world we are doing more to advance civilization than 
all the canting philanthropists of New and Old England will do 
in a century." 

Yet there was another side to the picture. The plantation 
system polarized society in the South. Of the 5,500,000 whites 
of that section only 350,000 were owners of slaves, and of these 
over 1 70,000 owned less than five slaves apiece. The great plan- 
tation lords, who monopolized the wealth of the South even more 
completely than the trust magnates monopolize the wealth of 
the country today, numbered not more than 5000 families. They 
naturally became a caste," controlling the poHtical, economic, 

ipor example, the 300,000 slaves in Virginia in 1790 had grown to but 
450,000 in 1850, although the natural rate of increase would indicate a slave 
population of at least 1,500,000 at the latter date. On the other hand, the 
30,000 slaves of Mississippi in 1820 increased to 150,000 by 1850, or more than 
double the number to be expected from census predictions. It is estimated that 
over 2,000,000 negroes were sent South from the border states of Virginia, Ken- 
tucky, Delaware, and Maryland during the decade 1850-1860. 

2In 1845 a good negro slave was worth about S750. In 1858 seven slaves 
were sold at auction in New Orleans, without a guaranty, at an average price 
of $1538 apiece (W. E. Dodd, "The Cotton Kingdom," page 26). 

3De Bow, in his "Statistical Review of the United States" (1854, p. 188), 
gives the total exports as $235,000,000, of which cotton formed 1112,315,317, 
manufactures $21,296,498, flour $10,524,331, tobacco $9,219,251, and beef and 
pork $6,657,973. 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



social, educational, and religious life of the section. Diversity 
of profitable industry was lacking, and slave labor excluded the 
immigrant. The planter sold cotton to buy lands and slaves, to 
raise more cotton, to sell for more land and slaves. As the in- 
tensive cultivation of the crop exhausted the soil rapidly, the 
planters were always in search of fresh lands. Cuba and Cen- 
tral America tempted them with the vision of new slave states.^ 
Measured not by the specious index of the exports of a staple 
commodity which enriched a few planters, but by the general 
diffusion of prosperity among its white population, the South 
was poor in 1850. 

Over 60 per cent of the land in New England was improved, 
as against 2 7 per cent in the states south of Mason and Dixon's 
line. Land values in the free states averaged S25.30 an acre, 
to $9.28 in the slave states. Of the $1,019,107,000 worth of 
manufactured goods, $845,430,430 worth (approximately 83 per 
cent) were turned out by Northern plants. The cotton mills 
yielded a product worth $65,501,689, over two thirds of which 
came from New England. Virginia and Georgia alone of the 
slave states manufactured as much as $1,000,000 worth of cot- 
ton. The deposits in the banks of the cotton belt amounted to 
but $20,000,000 in 1850, showing a great lack of fluid capital. 
Only in new cotton regions was the return on capital as high 
as in the manufacturing and shipping states. The great sums 
which came into the Southern ports in payment for raw cotton 
did not remain as a fund for diversified investment. Such part 
as was not laid out in new lands and slaves was virtually held 
in trust for Northern capitalists and middlemen, through whom 
the imports to the South were handled. On the eve of the Civil 
War, New York City alone had twice as much money on deposit 
as all the states of the South together. 

Much emphasis has been laid by historians of social condi- 
tions on the intellectual superiority of the North. A study of 
the census figures for 1850 confirms this judgment in some 

^See pages 462-465 for designs on Cuba. The astonishing career of the fili- 
busterer William Walker in Nicaragua is another chapter in the program of the 
slavery expansionists (T. C. Smith, "Parties and Slavery," pp. 252-253), 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 475 



respects and corrects it in others. The pubUc-school system 
of the North was far better developed and more Hberally sup- 
ported. In the free states 62,571 schools were allotted $5,794,- 
499 of taxes and public funds, as against 18,407 schools with 
$1,230,999 in the slave states. But, on the other hand, the 
South had 120 colleges, with 12,602 students, to 119 colleges, 
with 15,119 students, in the North.^ The total income from 
higher institutions of learning was larger in Virginia ($150,000) 
than in New York ($148,000), in Kentucky ($131,000) than 
in Ohio ($125,000), in Maryland ($112,000) than in Massa- 
chusetts ($107,000). Louisiana spent $25,000 of her public 
funds on colleges, South Carolina $4 1,000, and Virginia $90,000 ; 
while the figures for Massachusetts, Maine, and New York 
respectively were $5000, $6000, and $12,000. In the Southern 
states 72 daily newspapers were published, as against 182 in 
the North, New York alone having 51. Only 152 public li- 
braries are enumerated in the slave states, to 1065 in the North, 
of which Michigan boasted 280 and Massachusetts 177. Among 
the 13,330,658 white inhabitants of the free states there were 
449,816 ilHterates (approximately i in 30), while 513,082 of 
the 6,222,418 whites of the South (about i in 12) could neither 
read nor write. The statistics of crime, however, tell another 
story. New York had 1288 convicts in her prisons on June 8, 
1850, and Massachusetts had 1236; but the largest figures for 
the slave states were 423 for Louisiana and 313 for Virginia. 
Culture, like wealth, in the South was not diffused. It tended 
more and more to be the exclusive privilege of the planter class. 
The census of i860 shows an increase of more than 100 per 
cent over the figures of 1850 in the income of the higher institu- 
tions of learning of the slave states, with little or no growth 
in the public schools. 

The backward economic condition of the South was a mat- 
ter of great concern to the men of that section. An address 
presented to a convention of the Virginia State Agricultural 
Society in 1852, referring to the census of 1850, said: "In the 

Mt must be remembered also that many Southern youth were educated in 
Northern colleges. 



476 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



above figures we find no cause for self-gratulation. They show 
that we have not done our part in bringing the land into culti- 
vation. ... As other states accumulate the means of material 
greatness and glide past us on the road to wealth and empire, 
we slight the warnings of dull statistics and drive lazily along 
the field of ancient customs." Governor Wise, of the same 
state, wrote seven years later: Commerce has long since 
spread her sails and sailed away from you. You have not as 
yet dug more than enough coal to warm yourselves at your 
own hearths. . . . You have not yet spun coarse cotton enough 
to clothe your own slaves." The Lynchburg Virginian wrote in 
1852, Dependent on England and the North for almost every 
yard of cloth, and every coat, boot, and hat we wear ; for our 
axes, scythes, tubs^ and buckets, in short, for everything except 
our bread and meat, it must occur to the South that if our 
relations with the North should ever be severed ... we would 
be reduced to a state more abject than we are willing to look 
at even prospectively." ^^The finest ship timber in the world," 
said the New Orleans Delta, ^4s cut down and sent to Northern 
ship-yards thousands of miles off, where it is used in the con- 
struction of vessels, many of which come back here to engage 
in the transportation of Southern produce. In 1854 Maine 
built 168,632 tons of shipping, and Louisiana 1 509 tons. North 
Carolina, which was one of the banner ship-building states in 
the early days of the Union, constructed but 2532 tons in 1854, 
to over 90,000 tons for Massachusetts." Economists like De 
Bow urged the building of mills and factories^ and the appro- 
priation of public money for the improvement of roads, rivers, 
and harbors. Commercial conventions, which were held fre- 
quently in the decade 1 850-1860, proposed hundreds of meas- 
ures for the economic salvation of the South ; but no voice was 
raised in protest against the system which made all these pro- 
posals futile. Slavery must be not only maintained but ex- 

i"A part of our force must be taken from the soil and put into the mills. 
Spindles and looms must be brought to the cotton fields" (J. D. B. De Bow, 
"Industrial Resources of the Southern States," Vol. I, p. 229). A large cotton 
mill at Sparta, Georgia, had to close down in 1855, after running three years. 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 477 



tended. The industrial drive" of the decade was a failure. 
On the eve of the war the South was manufacturing but 4 per 
cent of its cotton crop, and the magnificent iron and timber 
industries which now enrich the states of Alabama and Georgia 
were undreamed of. 

No better index of the prosperity of the country at the acces- 
sion of President Pierce could be found than the figures of the 
expansion of our commerce by sea and land. A number of 
events in the late forties had given encouragement to American 
shipping. The Walker tariff of 1846 inaugurated an era of 
moderate customs rates which lasted till the Civil War. The 
revolutions of the year 1848 in central and western Europe 
gave the opportunity that continental wars always furnished 
for the increase of American trade. The same year gold was 
discovered in California, and the great migration to the Pacific 
coast began. The only practical way for the transportation of 
freight was the long loop around Cape Horn. Within two years 
after the discovery of gold the fast California clippers were 
doubling the Cape and reaching the Golden Gate in a little 
more than a hundred days out from Boston and New York, 
sometimes earning enough by a single voyage to pay for the 
ship. Great Britain repealed the last of her Navigation Acts in 
1850, and the lucrative trade of the East Indies was freely 
opened to the world. The ponderous and privileged old India- 
men," at once passenger ships, freighters, transports, and men- 
of-war, gave place to the swift packet boats. Then an exciting 
rivalry began between the Yankee clipper and the new British 
vessel built on her model for the carrying trade in the tea and 
spices of the Orient/ 

Following England's example of 1839 in subsidizing the 
newly projected steamship line of Samuel Cunard for carrying 
the mails, Congress voted in 1853 an annual subvention of 

dub of Boston merchants challenged the British shippers in 1852 to a race ' 
from England to China and back for a purse of $50,000. The Yankee clippers 
frequently beat the Cunard steamers in the run from Liverpool to Sandy Hook. 
Donald McKay's Lightning established a record of 436 sea miles in a day — ■ 
which was not equaled by transatlantic steamers for twenty-five years. 



478 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



$385,060 to Edward L. Collins, who put into service four 
paddle-wheel steamers which promised for a moment to transfer 
to the United States the supremacy of the sea-borne trade/ 
At the same time many new steamship lines were established 
along the Atlantic seaboard and down to Central and South 
America. The tonnage on the Great Lakes, which were rapidly 
being connected with the coast by railroads, increased from 
75,000 to 215,000 between 1840 and 1850 and jumped to 
611,000 in the next decade. According to a Senate Executive 
Document^ the tonnage of our merchant marine in the year 
1853 exceeded by 15 per cent that of Great Britain. The 
5,353,868 tons of American shipping in the foreign and domestic 
trade in i860 were not equaled until the opening of the twen- 
tieth century. Over 70 per cent of our foreign commerce in 
the decade 1 850-1 860 was carried in American ships. 

Most wonderful of all was the development of the American 
railroads in the early fifties. Until the middle of the century 
short stretches of iron track served as feeders or binding points 
for centers of navigation on rivers and canals. In the twenty 
years since the venerable Charles Carroll of Carrollton had laid 
the foundation stone for the construction of the Baltimore and 
Ohio Railroad (July 4, 1828) less than 5000 miles had been built. 
But the years i85o-i854sawthemileage increase to 20,000. The 
chief feature of this new era of railroad-building was the develop- 
ment of trunk lines" connecting the Ohio and Mississippi val- 
leys and the Great Lakes with the Atlantic seaboard. In May, 
1 85 1, the Erie railroad was opened, with telegraph wires along 
the road, from Piermont (near Nyack) on the Hudson to Dun- 
kirk near Lake Erie, the event being celebrated by a trip of 

iThe steamers of the Collins line — the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Baltic, and the 
Arctic — made the voyage in nine or ten days, clipping about twenty-four hours 
off the Cunarders' time. But unfortunately the Pacific and the Arctic went 
down, and Congress, with a short-sightedness only too common in its dealing 
with an American merchant marine, withdrew its financial support after five 
years of the experiment, 

2 Of the Thirty-ninth Congress, second session, p. 201. A report to the Treas- 
ury Department on the progress of shipbuilding in the "United States just after 
the Civil War. 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 479 



Daniel Webster and the other members of Fillmore^s cabinet 
over the entire 460 miles. The same year the Hudson River road 
reached Albany, and two years later the eleven independent 
roads between New York and Buffalo were consolidated into 
the New York Central. The Pennsylvania road, chartered in 
1846, ran its first through train from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh 
in 1852, and the next year the Baltimore and Ohio reached its 
western terminus at Wheeling, on the Ohio. The year of Pierce's 
inauguration saw also the Grand Trunk line opened between 
Portland and Montreal, and the construction of the Cleveland- 
Toledo line along the Lake Shore, which established all-rail 
connections between Chicago and the East. In 1855 St. Louis 
and New York were joined by rail.^ 

Although the federal government was committed by long 
years of Democratic rule to opposition to internal improve- 
ments at national expense, so important was the demand for 
federal aid in railroad-building that Congress yielded so far 
as to grant public lands to the states, to be turned over to the 
railroads. Illinois received 2,595,453 acres in 1850 for the 
Illinois Central Railroad, which was to connect Chicago with 
the Gulf of Mexico. Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, 
Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa were all 
recipients of large grants in the next half-dozen years. Alto- 
gether Congress donated some 20,000,000 acres in the decade 
1 850-1 860. States, counties, and cities supplemented the fed- 
eral grants, while bankers and promoters borrowed heavily from 
the financiers of London and Paris. It is estimated that some 
$450,000,000 of European capital was invested in American 
railroads on the eve of the Civil War. States like Illinois, Iowa, 
and Wisconsin were doubling in population each decade, and 

^The American Railway Times gives the following statistics of mileage in 
the chief railroad states at the close of 1854: Ohio, 47 roads with 2927 miles; 
Illinois, 31 roads with 2667 miles ; New York, 32 roads with 2625 miles ; Penn- 
sylvania, 69 roads with 1992 miles ; Indiana, 39 roads with 1453 miles ; Massa- 
chusetts, 39 roads with 1293 miles. Of the 16,500 miles built in the period 
1849-1857 the distribution, according to the Miscellaneous Statistics of the 
eighth census, was as follows: Northwestern States, 7500 ; New England States, 
4000; South Atlantic StateSj 2750; South Interior States, 2150. 



48o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the rapid rise in value of lands along their completed and 
projected lines made investment attractive. 

As the East reached out to the West, the West reached out 
to the Pacific. Asa Whitney of Michigan was the pioneer 
promoter of a Pacific railroad. After laboring for ten years 
he got the House Committee on Roads and Canals to report 
favorably on a plan in 1852 to put at his disposal a strip of 
land sixty miles wide from the Mississippi to the coast, which 
he was to sell to settlers. Out of the proceeds he was to build 
a railroad and eventually refund the government ten cents an 
acre for the land. Nothing came of this ambitious scheme of 
Whitney's, but projects were multipHed for building the iron 
road where but lately the stagecoach line had been established.^ 
The promoters of the hustling Northwest wanted Chicago for 
the terminal. The rival St. Louisans celebrated the Fourth of 
July, 1 85 1, by breaking ground for a Pacific road and actually 
sent the first steam train west of the Mississippi over the few 
completed miles of track eighteen months later. The men of 
the cotton states hoped to link Memphis or New Orleans with 
San Francisco by a railroad passing through Arkansas, Texas, 
and New Mexico. In spite of his strict constructionist prin- 
ciples inherited from Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, Pierce's Secre- 
tary of War, found the authority, under the plea of national 
defense," to promote the Memphis-Santa Fe scheme. James 
Gadsden, a railroad president of South Carolina, was made our 
minister to Mexico for the express purpose of purchasing the 
land south of New Mexico containing the lowest pass over the 
Rockies. He returned in the autumn of 1853 with the Gads- 
den Purchase of 50,000 square miles, acquired at a cost of 
$10,000,000. Congress went so far as to authorize surveys of 
routes at public cost, in the Rusk Bill of 1853, but all plans 

iln 1851 monthly stages from Independence, Kansas, to Santa Fe were 
started, the stages built water-tight for fording streams. Frederick Law 01m- 
stead tells in his "Journey in the Seaboard Slave States" (Vol. II, p. 5) of 
crossing a cypress swamp in a stage with holes bored in the floor. The pas- 
sengers climbed to the top when the vehicle struck deep water, and came back 
to their seats after the flood had been drained off. 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 481 



of peaceful expansion were adjourned by the approach of 
the great struggle between the North and the South. 

The effect of this era of railroad-building, which carried the 
connections from the Eastern seaports to nearly a score of 
points on the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Lakes, was momen- 
tous for our history. It revolutionized our economic and polit- 
ical geography. The old lines of trade ran north and south on 
both sides of the Alleghenies, by the coasting-routes and canals 
of the Atlantic seaboard and by the Mississippi River system. 
The agricultural products of the Northwest went down the river 
to JMemphis, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, where 
they were sold to the planters or reshipped on Gulf or ocean 
steamers. In the early forties New Orleans was the fifth city 
in size in the country, and second only to New York in the ex- 
port trade. Over 2000 steamers arrived at her levees annually, 
carrying half a million tons of freight, valued at $50,000,000. 
The total commerce of the Western waters" was estimated 
at $100,000,000. But the coming of the railroad shifted the 
routes of trade. The barrier of the Alleghenies sank. After 
1850, wheat could be brought from the Northwest by lake and 
rail to the Atlantic ports for 17 cents a bushel and flour for 
80 cents a barrel. The region which had produced tens of 
millions of bushels of grain to feed the South now began to 
produce hundreds of millions to feed Europe. Our exports of 
grain, encouraged by the repeal of the Corn Laws in England 
in 1846, the abolition of the last Navigation Acts in 1850, and 
the interruption of the Russian wheat supply by the Crimean 
War, increased 158 per cent in the decade following Franklin 
Pierce's inauguration. By i860 the export of grain from New 
Orleans had dropped to 2189 bushels, while 43,211,488 bushels 
were shipped eastward from the Lake Michigan ports alone. 
The once enormous export trade of the Queen City of the South 
was now confined to cotton, sugar, tobacco, and rice. 

The political effect of this shifting of economic lines to run 
east and west instead of north and south showed more and 
more clearly in the ten years preceding the Civil War. Political 
allegiance tends to follow material interests. ^'In 1847 ^ 



482 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



line of railroad entered Chicago ; its population numbered about 
25,000, and its property valuation approximated $7,000,000. 
Ten years later 4000 miles of railway connected with all points 
of the compass a city of nearly 100,000 people, and property 
valuations had increased 500 per cent."^ What was true of 
Chicago was true only in less degree of the other Lake cities, — 
like Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit, — whose amazing 
growth during the decade 1 850-1 860 was due to Eastern capital 
and Eastern merchants, bankers, and promoters. With the 
invoices and bills of lading there went to these Western centers 
also the ideas and ideals of the East — Emerson's quiet enthu- 
siasm for democracy, Whittier's quenchless love of freedom, 
Lowell's satire, and Greeley's scorn. It was only when the test 
of the sections came in 1861 that the full meaning of the shift- 
ing of the economic affiliations of the Northwest from South to 
East were realized — though penetrating Southerners saw them 
clearly and tried to hasten secession by a decade. 

Other counsels prevailed. The vast majority of American 
citizens. North and South, determined that harmony must be 
maintained and the Union preserved. If the tone of confidence 
was pitched so high that it sometimes broke into querulousness, 
it was only the relief from the strain of a decade filled with 
strife. If the constant reiteration, in the fervid oratory of the 
period, of the impossibility of a dissolution of the Union seems 
rather to betray the anxiety which it denies, it was only a par- 
donable impatience that all Americans should leave the recent 
quarrel behind and devote themselves with zeal to the mag- 
nificent prospect ahead. The time was ripe for reaping the 
harvest of America's matchless material resources. The Treas- 
ury was full, commerce was expanding, cities were springing 
up, mills and factories were humming, banks were multiplying, 
credit was easy, and capital was abundant. The halcyon days 
had dawned. After the bitter strife of the Compromise year 
there was peace — the business man's peace. In his first message 
to Congress, in December, 1853, President Pierce spoke of ^^the 

1 Archer B. IJulbert, !'The Paths of Inland Commerce" (Chronicles of America, 
Vol. XXI), p. 172. 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 483 



sense of repose and security to the public mind" which had 
been restored to all parts of our country, adding, ^^That this 
repose is to suffer no shock during my official term, if I have 
the power to prevent it, those who placed me here may be as- 
sured." Less than fifty days later Pierce was closeted with 
Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on 
Territories, and a few other members of Congress in lending 
the executive approval to a measure which was destined not 
only to disturb the country's repose but to head it straight 
toward civil war. 

The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise 

That part of the Louisiana Purchase territory lying west 
and north of the states of Missouri and Iowa was known as 
Nebraska in 1850. It was a vast unorganized region of 485,000 
square miles, larger than the combined area of all the free 
states in the Union excepting California. It contained less than 
1000 white inhabitants, and our government had allotted to 
various Indian tribes large tracts in the smiling valleys of the 
Platte and Kansas Rivers. The overland migration to Cali- 
fornia, which had followed the discovery of gold, together with 
the nascent plans for a Pacific railroad, had brought the zone 
of this region immediately west of Missouri and Iowa to the 
public notice in the early fifties. A bill for the organization 
of the Nebraska Territory passed the House in the last session 
of Fillmore's term, but Congress expired (March 4, 1853) 
before a vote was reached in the Senate. 

A few days after the assembling of President Pierce's first 
Congress, Senator A. C. Dodge of Iowa introduced a bill for 
the organization of Nebraska, which was referred to the Com- 
mittee on Territories, Stephen A. Douglas chairman. The bill 
was reported on January 4, 1854^ with the following fateful 
amendments: 

Section 21. And be it further enacted, That in order to avoid all 
misconstruction, it is hereby declared to be the true intent and mean- 
ing of this act, so far as the question of slavery is concerned, to 



484 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



carry into practical operation the propositions and principles estab- 
lished by the Compromise Measures of 1850, to wit: 

First, that all questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories 
and the new States to be formed therefrom, are to be left to the 
decision of the people residing therein, through their appropriate 
representatives. 

Second, that all cases involving title to slaves and questions of per- 
sonal property are referred to the adjudication of the local tribunals, 
with the right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. 

Third, that the provisions of the Constitution and the Laws of the 
United States in respect to fugitives from service are to be carried 
into faithful execution in all the organized Territories the same as 
in the States. 

It will be noticed that the Missouri Compromise, by which 
the land in question had been dedicated to freedom thirty-four 
years before, is not mentioned in the amendments, although 
it is practically annulled by their provisions. When Archibald 
Dixon, a Whig senator from Kentucky, announced his inten- 
tion of introducing an amendment expressly repealing the Mis- 
souri Compromise, Douglas consented to the change. Only, 
knowing that it would arouse great antagonism at the North, 
he insisted on having the backing of the administration. This 
he obtained in the conference with Pierce mentioned at the close 
of the last section. The day after the conference (January 24) 
Douglas substituted for the Nebraska Bill a Kansas-Nebraska 
Bill, providing for two territories divided by the thirty-seventh 
parallel of latitude. It was the tacit understanding that slavery 
should go into the southern territory of Kansas and be kept 
out of the northern territory of Nebraska. The bill declared 
that ^'the eighth section of the act preparatory to the admission 
of Missouri into the Union" (a section excluding slavery from 
the Louisiana Purchase north of the line of 36° 30') was su- 
perseded by the principles of the legislation of 1850, com- 
monly called the Compromise Measures," and was therefore 
"inoperative."^ 

iBy a later amendment the wording "superseded by" was changed to "incon- 
sistent with," and "inoperative" was changed to "inoperative and void." 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 485 



The opposition to the proposed repeal of the Missouri Com- 
promise, which Douglas foresaw, was not slow in appearing. 
On the day after he introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Bill an 
address known as ^^The Appeal of the Independent Democrats" 
was pubHshed over the signatures of Senators Chase, Sumner, 
Wade, Smith, and De Witt. It denounced the bill as ^^a gross 
violation of a sacred pledge" and a ^^part and parcel of an 
atrocious plot to exclude from a vast and unoccupied region 
immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own 
States, and to convert it into a dreary region of despotism in- 
habited by masters and slaves." It declared that ^'the dearest 
interests of the people were made the mere hazards of a presi- 
dential game," the action of the Illinois senator being ^^a bid 
for Southern support in the next Democratic convention." The 
influential newspapers of the North condemned the bill. From 
mass meetings and state legislatures came stirring resolutions 
of protest. Douglas himself declared that he could travel 
from Boston to Chicago by the light of his burning effigies." 

But Douglas was not a man to be daunted by opposition. 
Aggressive, ingenious, confident, plausible, he always rose to 
his greatest heights as the fight grew harder. Almost unaided 
he met the arguments of Wade, Chase, Sumner, Seward, and 
Everett on the floor of the Senate day after day. He pushed his 
bill with relentless energy. The Compromise Measures of 1850 
had lingered six months in Congress ; Douglas put the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill through the Senate in 39 days. In the early 
morning of March 4, 1854, after a final debate lasting seven- 
teen hours, the vote was taken — 37 for, 14 against. In the 
House the preponderating influence of the North delayed the 
bill for more than two months longer; but finally (May 22), 
under the skillful management of Alexander H. Stephens, it 
passed by the narrow margin of 113 to 100 votes. On May 30 
President Pierce appended his signature. 

The sinister credit for putting the Kansas-Nebraska Bill 
through Congress belongs to Stephen A. Douglas. The argu- 
ment of his report and of his speeches on the subject was that 
the country, by the adoption of the Compromise of 1850, had 



486 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



substituted the principle of "squatter sovereignty" for that of 
a geographical dividing line in the regulation of slavery in the 
territories. He boasted that the new principle was national, 
knowing no lines nor boundaries, no North nor South, whereas 
the old line of 36° 30' sanctioned the division of the country 
into two permanently hostile sections. The North, he said, 
had refused to extend the line of 36° 30' through the new 
territory acquired by the Mexican War, thus wisely abandon- 
ing the pernicious principle of the Missouri Compromise. He 
was now merely arguing for their consistent support of the 
new doctrine which had brought the happy solution of the 
slavery question in the Compromise of 1850. His bill, he main- 
tained, was in strict accord with the pledges and platform of 
the triumphant Democracy of 1852. 

But the spuriousness of Douglas's argument is obvious. 
There was no hint in the debates of 1850 that the Compromise 
Measures were meant to apply to any other region than the 
territory just acquired in the Mexican War, or to be erected 
into a "principle" to "supersede" any former legislation. The 
Northern votes necessary for its passage could never have been 
obtained on any such interpretation. Clay and Webster, to 
whose efforts the success of the Compromise of 1850 was due, 
would not have spoken a word in its behalf if they had supposed 
that it meant the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Indeed, 
the chief argument of both these statesmen for the application 
of popular sovereignty to Utah and New Mexico in 1850 was 
that it actually would not mean the extension of slave territory.^ 
Douglas had the audacity to argue that because the North 
refused to extend the line of 36° 30' through the Mexican ces- 
sion, which was free soil under Mexican law, it therefore had 
virtually consented to abolish the 36° 30' line in the Louisiana 
Purchase territory ! In other words, the rejection of the pro- 
posal to legalize slavery south of 36° 30' in New Mexico was 
equivalent to the abandonment of the prohibition of slavery 

i"They [Clay and Webster] bargained with slavery not for the purpose of 
saving it, but in the sure confidence that it would die a natural death." — Louis 
Rowland, "Stephen A. Douglas," p, 93 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 487 



north of 36° 30' in Nebraska. Douglas's crafty attempt to use 
the support of the names of the two great Whig leaders of 1850 
for such logic was exposed by his adversaries in the Senate, 
especially by Edward Everett, who had been a close associate 
of Webster's, had voted for the Compromise of 1850, and was 
a member of Douglas's committee in 1854. However, Douglas's 
persistency and unrivaled skill in debate bore down all opposi- 
tion. He had his way in the triumph which was eventually 
to wreck his own political career and to bring untold woes upon 
his country. 

The motives which impelled Douglas to inject the fateful 
slavery amendments into the Nebraska Bill of 1854^ have 
been the subject of much speculation among historians. The 
most widely accepted theory is that expressed by Mr. Rhodes 
(Vol. I, p. 430) ; namely, that ^'the action of the IlHnois Senator 
was a bid for Southern support in the next Democratic conven- 
tion." There is no doubt that Douglas was ambitious for the 
presidency. There is no doubt, further, that the men who 
would be his chief competitors for the nomination in 1856 were 
all courting the favor of the South.^ But this is not enough 
to prove that Douglas sold himself to the South in 1854 for 
a mess of presidential pottage. In spite of his famous remark 
in 1849 that ^'the Missouri Compromise was canonized in the 
hearts of the American people," and of his prediction in the 
debate which followed that the land stretching from the Mis- 
souri to the Pacific would be free soil, he had no deep ethical 
convictions on the subject of slavery. Again and again we have 
his confession that he didn't care whether slavery was voted 
up or voted down." He did care, however, a great deal about 
the organization of the Western territory, the quieting of Indian 

^In all previous attempts to organize the territory of Nebraska (which began 
with a bill introduced into the House by Douglas himself in 1844) there is no 
hint of disturbing the Missouri Compromise, 

2 Pierce was hand in glove with Jefferson Davis. Buchanan was lending him- 
self to the schemes for the acquisition of Cuba. Marcy was more cautious but 
not less willing. Cass was the arch-" Doughface" — the Northern man with 
Southern principles. Moreover Douglas had a handicap to overcome in that he 
was born in the abolitionist state of Vermont and was a farmer's son. 



488 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



claims, and the choice of the middle Nebraska route for the 
projected Pacific railway, instead of the Southern survey which 
was being pushed by Jefferson Davis and other powerful friends 
of the administration (see page 480). 

No other man had had so much of a hand in the organization 
of our trans-Mississippi territory as Douglas. As chairman of 
the House and Senate Committees on Territories he had re- 
ported the bills by which Utah, New Mexico, Washington, 
Oregon, and Minnesota had been erected as territories and 
Texas, Iowa, Florida, California, and Wisconsin had been ad- 
mitted as states. It was expansion, not slavery, that he was 
interested in; and if he incorporated the slavery clauses in 
his Kansas-Nebraska Bill to make it palatable to the South,^ 
it was certainly not with the intention of extending slavery 
and probably not primarily with the intention of gaining the 
presidency, but for the immediate object of getting the new 
territory organized. His mistake, or rather his moral failing, 

1 Professor P. O. Ray, in his monograph on "The Repeal of the Missouri 
Compromise" (1909), pointed out the immense importance of local politics in 
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. In the election of 1850 Thomas H. Benton had been 
driven by David R. Atchison (proslavery) from the seat in the Senate which 
he had held for thirty years. In his fight to regain his seat Benton appealed 
to the people of Missouri on the issue of expansion, urging them to settle on 
the Nebraska lands, where the bona-fide Indian allotments were scarce. Atchison 
did not favor expansion, because he regarded the Missouri Compromise as 
firmly established, and rather than have a new free territory to the west of 
Missouri (which was already bounded on two sides by free states), he would 
have no new territory at all. But Benton's insistence on the popular issue of 
expansion forced Atchison to change his position in order to escape the accusa- 
tion of being indifferent to the demands of the Missouri frontiersmen. Driven 
thus to support a Nebraska bill, Atchison changed his position on the Missouri 
Compromise. It must now be repealed. As President pro tern, of the Senate he 
used his influence with Douglas to this end. Douglas himself had been absent 
in Europe when the bitter battle between the senator and the ex-senator of 
Missouri was being waged in the summer of 1853 ; and how little he thought 
of the revival of the question of slavery in the territories on his return, only a 
month before the opening of Congress, we may judge from a letter which he 
wrote to a political friend in Illinois outlining the important matters to come 
before the session. These were tariff reform, Treasury reform, river and har- 
bor bills, revision of tonnage duties, grants for railroads, and the Pacific rail^ 
way. Not a word about slavery or Nebraska! 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 4S9 



was that he did not see that what to him was a minor and in- 
cidental element in the bill was just the crucial point of it for 
an increasing number of Northern men. ^'It is enough," says 
William G. Brown, ^Ho decide that Douglas took a wrong 
course, and to point out how ambition may very well have led 
him into it. It is too much to say that he knew it was wrong, 
and took it solely because he was ambitious."^ 

James Ford Rhodes says that the Kansas-Nebraska Act "in 
its scope and consequences was the most momentous measure 
that passed Congress from the day that the Senators and Repre- 
sentatives first met to the outbreak of the Civil War" (Vol. I, 
p. 490) ; and John W. Burgess declares that the act was "proba- 
bly the greatest error which the Congress of the United States 
ever committed, and the arguments by which it was supported 
were among the most specious fallacies that have ever misled 
the minds of men" ("The Middle Period," p. 405). Certain it is 
that with the passage of this act the day of compromise between 
the sections was over. "The Fugitive Slave Law did much to 
unglue the eyes of men," wrote Emerson, "and now the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill leaves us staring." The importance of the act 
may be seen in its immediate consequences. It gave the finish- 
ing stroke to the Whig party as a national organization. Every 
Whig member of Congress from the states north of Mason and 
Dixon's line voted against the bill, and all but seven of the 
Whigs from the states south of the line voted for it. It drove 
thousands of Northern Democrats out of the party. It gave an 
immense impetus to the Free-Soil propaganda. "Pierce and 
Douglas," wrote Greeley in the New York Tribune, "have made 
more Abolitionists in three months than Garrison and Phillips 
could have made in half a century." The Anti-Nebraska men 
of all shades of opinion drew together to resist the extension of 
slavery into the territory long dedicated to freedom.^ A year 

1 William G. Brown, "Life of Stephen A. Douglas," p. 88. 

2 The autumn elections of 1854 sent 117 Anti-Nebraska men to the House and 
reduced the administration Democrats from 159 to 79 members. "Of the forty- 
two Northern Democrats who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, only 
seven were re-elected" (Rhodes, Vol. II, p. 67), 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



after the bill was passed the Democrats were confronted by a 
rapidly growing party whose platform was the subordination 
of every other political issue to the fight for the restriction 
of slavery. When Douglas reported his bill the Northwestern 
states were solidly Democratic. Every one of the senators 
from Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and all 
but five of the twenty-nine members from these states in the 
lower House, belonged to the party of the administration. The 
enormous influence of Douglas kept Illinois in the Democratic 
column for one more presidential election ; but Michigan, Wis- 
consin, and Iowa went over to the new Republican party 
forthwith, and only Indiana remained permanently in the 
"doubtful column.'' 

Moreover, the political revolution caused by the Kansas- 
Nebraska Act was the result of an apparently needless and 
wanton disturbance of the status quo of slavery in the Louisiana 
Purchase territory. The Democrats were securely estabUshed 
in power in every branch of the government. Unionist senti- 
ment was victorious in the South.^ President Pierce was pledged 
to the "finality" of the Compromise of 1850. Douglas himself 
had said on leaving the stormy session of the Compromise Con- 
gress that he never expected to make another speech on the sub- 
ject of slavery. 

Of course, one may say that two civilizations so hostile to 
each other could not long continue to exist side by side, espe- 
cially when one was coming to be more and more a moral re- 
proach in the eyes of the other; that if it had not been the 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill it would have been some other bill re- 
viving the latent strife of the sections and revealing the futility 
of the compromise which men called final. Such speculations 
may comfort the philosopher and excuse in his eyes the human 
agents of fate or Providence. But for the historian a man is 

^This does not mean that the South was at all converted to the doctrine of 
a "consolidated" government. The Unionist victory of 185 1 was not a repudia- 
tion of states' rights. It signified only that the time was not yet ripe for a 
Southern " nationalist " movement. " To secede from the Union now," said Cheves 
of South Carolina, "would be to secede also from the South," 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 491 



judged by his deeds. Whatever his provocation or his pretext, 
his temptation or his excuse, the fact remains that it was Stephen 
A. Douglas who undid the gates of Janus. And for this chiefly 
he will be remembered as long as our history is written. 

While the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was still under discussion 
in the Senate, a group of Whigs, Democrats, and Free-Soilers 
met at Ripon, Wisconsin (February 28), and resolved that if 
the bill passed they would organize a new party on the sole 
issue of resistance to the extension of slavery. E. A. Bovay, 
the leader of the group, suggested in a letter to Horace Greeley 
that the new party should take the name of "Republican," 
and Greeley popularized the name through the columns of the 
New York Tribune, On July 6 several men of all shades of 
political opinion met in a grove of oaks on the outskirts of 
Jackson, Michigan, and formally launched the new Republican 
party. They adopted a platform declaring that slavery was 
"a violation of the rights of man" and of "the law of nature, 
which is the law of liberty." The history of the formation of 
our government, and the testimony of men like Washington 
and Jefferson, showed that it was "the purpose of our fathers 
not to promote but to prevent the spread of slavery," that the 
Constitution gave Congress "full and complete power for the 
municipal government of the Territories," that the repeal of 
the Missouri Compromise was an act "unprecedented in the 
history of our country" and "a wanton and dangerous frustra- 
tion of the purposes and hopes" of the founders of this nation. 
They demanded the repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the 
repeal of the Fugitive-Slave Law of 1850, and the abolition of 
slavery in the District of Columbia. They recommended the 
calling of a general convention of the free states (and of such 
slave states as might wish to attend) to adopt nation-wide 
measures for combating the spread of slavery. They agreed 
to sink their political differences in the common fight for free- 
dom and "to cooperate and be known as Republicans until the 
contest be terminated." They nominated a full state ticket and 
elected it the following November, together with three of the 
four Michigan congressmen and a decided majority in both 



492 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



houses of the state legislature. The summer and early autumn 
of 1854 saw conventions in various other states (Maine, Ver- 
mont, Massachusetts, Ohio, New York) to organize political 
opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. James G. Blaine said 
many years later that seven states claimed the honor of being 
the birthplace of the Republican party, as seven cities contended 
for the honor of Homer's birth. This very rivalry is a proof 
of the spontaneity and universality of the protest against the 
repeal of the Missouri Compromise. 

The political upheaval caused by the Kansas-Nebraska Act 
resulted in one of the strangest temporary movements in our 
history. We have already noticed the rise of the Native- 
American, or Know-No thing," agitation in connection with 
the increasing immigration of the forties (see page 470). The 
disruption of the Whig party and the disgust of many Northern 
Democrats with the program of Douglas sent into the ranks of 
the ^^Know-Nothings" thousands of voters who had yet no 
organized Republican party to which to rally. They elected 
governors or legislatures in several states (New England, Mary- 
land, Kentucky, California) and sent a respectable delegation to 
Congress. But a party founded on principles so un-American 
as those of the American" party — secrecy, religious intoler- 
ance, and opposition to immigration — could never outlast a 
period of momentary and panicky confusion in our country. 
Furthermore, in the attempt to hold the South Americans" 
and the North Americans" together it split in its first and 
only presidential convention, of 1856. It served merely as a 
kind of halfway house to detach Whigs and Democrats from 
their old allegiance. Like the frog in La Fontaine's fable, it 
burst in the effort to blow itself up to the size of a presidential ox. 

Meanwhile events in the new territory of Kansas were fur- 
nishing a dismal commentary on Douglas's doctrine of popular 
sovereignty. Immediately after the passage of the act a battle 
for the control of the territory began. ^^Come on, then, gentle- 
men of the Slave States!" cried Seward; "since there is no 
escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of freedom. We 
will engage in a competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 493 



God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers 
as it is in the right ! " Eh Thayer and Amos Lawrence of Mas- 
sachusetts organized the first Emigrant Aid Society to colonize 
the new territory. The first company of settlers, twenty-four 
in number, started from Massachusetts in the middle of July 
and finally pitched their tents on the banks of the Kansas River, 
where the free town of Lawrence sprang up. The New Eng- 
landers had to journey more than a thousand miles to reach 
the territory, but the proslavery men of Missouri had only to 
cross the border. This they did by the hundreds, forming 
societies of ^'Blue Lodges'' or ''Sons of the South," whose pur- 
pose was to defeat the schemes of the immigrants to ''aboli- 
tionize Kansas." They founded the town of Atchison on the 
left bank of the Missouri River and announced in their im- 
provised paper, The Squatter Sovereign^ that they were ready 
'Ho lynch and hang, tar and feather and drown every white- 
livered Abolitionist who dared to pollute the soil of Kansas." 
When the first governor, Andrew H. Reeder of Pennsylvania, 
arrived in the territory in October, he found the stage set for 
a violent contest of vituperation, fraud, and murder which was 
to last for more than two years. Governor Reeder set Novem- 
ber 29, 1854, as the day for the election of a territorial delegate 
to Congress. On the day before the election, Missourians began 
to pour into Kansas "with every kind of vehicle that could 
run on wheels and every horse or mule that could stand on 
legs." The "invaders" cast over 1700 votes for the proslavery 
candidate Whitfield, insuring his election by an overwhelming 
majority, and returned to their homes. 

It was thus that "popular sovereignty" was inaugurated in 
Kansas. The government which was begun in fraud was con- 
tinued in lawlessness and terror. Early in 1855 Reeder took 
a census of the territory, preparatory to the establishment of a 
legislature. The count showed a population of about 8500, 
of whom 2900 were males of voting age. Yet on election day 
(March 30) 6320 votes were cast (of which more than five 
sixths were illegal), and a proslavery legislature was elected. 
Summoned by the governor to meet at Pawnee, they defied his 



494 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



authority, unseated the few Free Soil members who had been 
chosen, and moved to Shawnee Mission on the Missouri border, 
where they proceeded to enact laws (over the governor's veto) 
wholly favorable to slavery. Governor Reeder, whose only of- 
fense was his sincere effort to secure an honest election in Kan- 
sas, was removed by President Pierce in the midsummer of 
1855 and went over to the antislavery party, by whom he was 
immediately chosen territorial delegate. 

The Free Soil men, unable to cope with the Missouri immi- 
grants, proceeded with their own program. Adopting the ^'CaH- 
fornia plan," they held a convention at Topeka in October, 

1855, and framed a free-state constitution, which they sub- 
mitted to the people for ratification in December. The pro- 
slavery men, of course, ignored the Topeka Constitution. It 
was adopted by a strictly Free Soil vote. Under it state officers 
were chosen and a legislature was elected to meet at Topeka on 
November 4, 1856. Thus Kansas had two governments — the 

legal" one at Shawnee Mission, organized by fraud, and the 
illegal" one at Topeka, representing the will of the majority 
of bona-fide inhabitants. President Pierce was distressed by 
the situation. The strife in Kansas, he told Reeder when the 
latter visited Washington in the spring of 1855, haunted him 
day and night. In his message to Congress in December he 
tried to dodge responsibility for the situation by declaring that 
nothing had happened in Kansas ^Ho justify Federal inter- 
ference"; but the next month he sent in a special message in 
which he took sides squarely with the proslavery party. He 
laid all the blame for the strife on the Emigrant Aid Societies, 
denounced the Topeka Constitution and the elections held un- 
der it as ^'illegal," and recognized the fraudulent legislature at 
Shawnee Mission as ^Hhe legitimate legislative assembly of the 
Territory." 

When the free-state legislature met at Topeka in March, 

1856, under the moderating influence of Governor" Charles 
Robinson, it refrained from any acts of violence against either 
Pierce's new governor, Wilson Shannon of Ohio, or the ter- 
ritorial legislature which Pierce had recognized. It elected 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 495 



Reeder and Lane as United States senators and appointed a 
commission to draw up a petition asking for the admission of 
Kansas to the Union as a free state. Nevertheless Judge 
Lecompton, of the first Federal District Court of the territory, 
virtually charged the jury to find indictments against Robinson, 
Reeder, Lane, and other prominent free-state leaders "for ^^con- 
structive treason." Every month saw the confusion increasing 
and civil war more imminent in Kansas. A committee of the 
House sent to the territory in April, 1856, to investigate the 
conflicting claims of Whitfield and Reeder to the delegate's 
seat, reported that there was no prospect of a fair election in 
Kansas without the presence of United States troops at every 
polling-place. Free Soil immigrants were pouring into the ter- 
ritory by the thousands. The Missourians, unable to hold the 
proslavery fort alone, appealed to the South for aid in the 
autumn of 1855, and in response detachments of several hun- 
dred men marched from Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia 
into Kansas. Major Buford's Alabamians were armed by Gov- 
ernor Shannon and used as a Kansas militia. The free-state 
men fortified their capital of Lawrence. Under these circum- 
stances the deed of violence which should lead to civil war was 
almost inevitable. It came with the cowardly attempt of some 
free-state man to assassinate the proslavery Sheriff Jones, as he 
rode into Lawrence to arrest a man for murder. In revenge the 
sheriff got control of the marshal's posse and excited a lawless 
raid ^Ho wipe out Lawrence." Armed men entered the town 
on May 21, 1856, under banners bearing the mottoes and de- 
vices of various Southern clans, and proceeded to wreck the 
Free-State Hotel and the ^^abolitionist" printing-press and to 
pillage and burn private dwellings. 

While the ashes of Lawrence were still hot an outrageous 
deed was perpetrated in the United States Senate. Sumner 
of Massachusetts had delivered a speech on May 19-20 called 
^'The Crime against Kansas." It was a fierce attack on the 
proslavery leaders in the territory and their abetters in the 
South. Sumner singled out for the special victim of his venom- 
ous invective Senator A. P. Butler of South Carolina, who 



496 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



was not present to reply. Late in the afternoon of the twenty- 
second, when Sumner was working at his desk in the deserted 
Senate chamber, Preston S. Brooks, a congressman from South 
CaroHna and a relative of Butler's, walked up to the senator 
and, with a few words of justifiable reproach, struck him 
on the head with a heavy gutta-percha cane. Sumner, dazed, 
struggled to rise, wrenching the desk from its fastenings in his 
effort. But Brooks rained blow after blow upon him until he 
sank bleeding and insensible to the floor. Toombs, standing 
in the lobby, saw Sumner fall, and Douglas and Slidell, con- 
versing in an anteroom, were told by a Senate page what was 
going on. But none of these men interfered to stay Brooks's 
murderous fury. A motion to expel Brooks from the House 
failed to get the necessary two-thirds vote. He resigned and 
was immediately reelected by his district with emphatic testi- 
monials of approval and with only six dissenting votes. Sumner 
was gradually restored to a moderate degree of health by the 
skill of European specialists, but it was not until December, 
1859, that he was able to resume the seat in the Senate which 
the legislature of Massachusetts had kept vacant for him. 

Still another deed of horror was crowded into the fateful 
week which saw the sack of Lawrence and the attack on Sumner. 
John Brown, a fanatical immigrant farmer from New England, 
brooding over the murder of free-state men in Kansas, pro- 
ceeded on the night of May 24, with his four sons and three 
other associates, to the settlement of Dutch Henry's on Potta- 
watomie Creek, and, dragging five proslavery men from their 
cabins, hacked them to pieces. This unspeakable deed let loose 
civil war in Kansas. Bands of armed men marched up and 
down in the land, Hke the factional armies" of a Central Amer- 
ican republic. Farmers went in groups, armed to the teeth, 
to till their fields. No herd was safe from plunder and no house 
nor barn from the torch. Governor Shannon tried hard to 
restore order. He sent Colonel Sumner with United States 
dragoons to disperse the marauding bands, but the guerrilla 
warfare continued almost unabated. The passions roused at 
Lawrence and Dutch Henry's had to burn themselves out. 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 497 



Eight days after the murders on the Pottawatomie the Demo- 
cratic nominating convention met at Cincinnati. In the face 
of what was happening in Kansas it had the hardihood to de- 
clare in its platform that the principle of popular sovereignty 
embodied the only sound and safe solution of the slavery ques- 
tion." Nevertheless, the delegates wisely refrained from nomi- 
nating a man who could in any way be held responsible for the 
Kansas situation. Their prime task was to hold the Northern 
Democracy together. Therefore they passed over Pierce and 
Douglas and on the seventeenth ballot named James Buchanan, 
a mediocre man, whose eminent ^^availability" consisted in the 
facts that he was acceptable to the North, that he had been 
absent as minister to Great Britain when the Kansas struggle 
was precipitated, and that he was expected to carry his own 
pivotal state of Pennsylvania. John C. Breckinridge of Ken- 
tucky was nominated for vice president. 

The convention of the new Republican party met at Phila- 
delphia on June 17. Seward might have had the nomination, 
but he declined to let his name be presented, probably because 
he thought that defeat at the polls would injure his political 
career. He underestimated the chances of Republican success 
in 1856, and he knew that his pronounced hostility to the Amer- 
ican party, his abolitionist views,^ and his extreme Whiggery in 
New York politics would weaken his candidacy. Justice John 
McLean of Ohio, who had served on the Supreme Court since 
his appointment by Jackson twenty-six years before, was the 
choice of the more conservative delegates. But the candidacy 
of John C. Fremont of California had been carefully worked 
up for months before the convention. Fremont was a man of 
small judgment and almost no political experience, but his ro- 
mantic career as the pathfinder" of the Far West, his con- 
quest" of California, his youth and energy^ all recommended 
him as a fit leader for a young and aggressive party. ^'The 
Fremont boom in the West," said Samuel Bowles, ^'went like 

^Seward had publicly advocated the repeal of the Fugitive-Slave Law of 
1850 and the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. 



498 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



a prairie fire." The first formal ballot resulted in 520 votes for 
Fremont, 37 for McLean, and one for Seward. William M. 
Dayton of New Jersey was nominated as Fremont's running- 
mate, although Abraham Lincoln, a supporter of Judge McLean, 
received no votes for second place on the ticket on an informal 
ballot. The Know-Nothings " nominated ex-President Fillmore. 

The Republicans appealed to the country on a platform which 
embodied the principles of the Wilmot Proviso and the Free- 
Soilers of 1848. It was the right and duty of Congress" to 
exercise its power of control over the territories of the United 
States by abolishing in them the ^Hwin relics of barbarism," 
slavery and polygamy. The platform reviewed and condemned 
the shocking violations of law and order in Kansas, all ^Mone 
with the knowledge, sanction, and procurement of the pres- 
ent administration." It demanded the immediate admission of 
Kansas to the Union under its free-state constitution. The 
Democrats knew that every day's prolongation of anarchy in 
Kansas injured their prospects for the autumn election. Senator 
Toombs of Georgia introduced a bill to secure ^^a fair and 
honest expression of the opinion of the present inhabitants of 
Kansas." Under the supervision of a commission of five men 
appointed by the President a careful census of the territory 
was to be taken ; delegates to a convention were to be chosen, 
and they were to frame a constitution if the convention should 
vote it expedient for Kansas to seek admission to the Union at 
that time. The bill passed the Senate (33 to 12) on July 3 ; a 
few hours later the Republican House passed a bill, by the nar- 
row margin of 99 votes to 97, for the admission of Kansas under 
the Topeka Constitution. Neither House would consider the 
other's proposal. The Senate bill was fair enough, but the 
Republicans maintained that the people of Kansas had already 
decided to become a free state. Moreover, they would not in- 
trust the appointment of a commission to Pierce, whom they had 
condemned in their platform as the man responsible for the an- 
archy and violence in the territory. Douglas charged them with 
planning to keep the Kansas question unsettled in order to gain 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 499 

votes. *^An angel from heaven," he said, could not write a bill 
to restore peace in Kansas that would be acceptable to the Aboli- 
tionist Republican party previous to the presidential election." 

Congress having adjourned in August without bringing any 
relief in the Kansas situation, the President took the matter 
into his own hands. A new governor (the third in as many 
years) was sent out in the person of the able John W. Geary 
of Pennsylvania. The free-state leaders who had been im- 
prisoned at the virtual behest of Judge Lecompton were re- 
leased, and the unrighteous judge was eventually removed from 
the bench. All bodies of armed men except those authorized 
by the government were ordered to disperse. Federal troops 
were stationed at the danger points. At the end of September 
Geary wrote to Secretary Marcy : Peace now reigns in Kansas. 
Confidence is gradually being restored. Settlers are returning 
to their claims. Citizens are resuming their ordinary pursuits, 
and a general gladness pervades the community." If the report 
was somewhat too roseate, there was enough truth in it to give 
heart to the Democrats in the approaching election. It should 
be noted in passing that Geary's work was accomplished ^^upon 
the point of the sword of the Union." It testified to the utter 
breakdown of the experiment of popular sovereignty in Kansas, 
the repudiation by the administration itself of the doctrine of 
national irresponsibihty." 

Adopting the old slogan of the Free Soil party of 1848, ^Tree 
soil, free speech, free labor, and free men," and adding ^'Fre- 
mont and victory" with a shout, the Republicans went into 
the campaign with the fervor of crusaders. But their zeal out- 
ran their prospects, even as their cause was stronger than their 
candidate. It was inevitable that the Republican ticket should 
be a Northern one, and this wholly sectional ticket furnished 
the Democrats with their best campaign material.^ From public 
men and the press all through the South came the awful warn- 

^In the election of 1828 both the tickets had been "sectional" — Adams and 
Rush (Republican) from the North, and Jackson and Calhoun (Democratic) 
from the South. But Mason and Dixon's line was not yet a significant separator. 



500 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



ing that the triumph of the Black Republicans" would mean 
the immediate dissolution of the Union. Fillmore asked the 
RepubHcans how they could have ^'the madness or folly to 
believe that our Southern brethren would submit to be governed 
by Fremont." Conservatives in the North and South alike 
turned to Buchanan. Toombs, the old Whig leader in Georgia, 
who had proposed the conciliatory Kansas bill in the Senate, 
said that the object of Fremont's friends was to conquer the 
South. Rufus Choate, the prominent Whig statesman of Massa- 
chusetts, ^Hurned his eyes from the consequences" which would 
ensue if Fremont should be elected. ^^To the fifteen states of 
the South," he said, ^'Fremont's government would appear an 
alien government" — worse than that, ^^a hostile government." 
Again, as in 1850 and 1852, the business interests and the more 
conservative men of the North, with whom the preservation of 
industrial peace and the political status quo counted for more 
than the support of a moral principle at the risk of certain 
agitation and possible dissolution of the Union, carried the day 
for the Democrats. Buchanan was sure of the votes south of 
Mason and Dixon's line (with the possible exception of Maryland 
and Kentucky, which were strong for Fillmore), and he needed 
only Pennsylvania and one other Northern state to win. The 
contest in Pennsylvania was hectic. The Democrats, North 
and South, poured large sums of money into the state, and the 
Republicans sent more than a thousand campaign speakers into 
the cities and towns from the Delaware to the Alleghenies. 
Buchanan carried the state by a m.argin of only 1025 votes in a 
total of 460,404. Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey, and California 
also went Democratic. In spite of the fact that Buchanan 
received 174 electoral votes to 114 for Fremont, the Republicans 
were far from discouraged. As a new party in their first presi- 
dential election, they had polled 1,314,264 votes against 1,838- 
169 for Buchanan, who had the backing of the old estabHshed 
Democratic party, in possession of all the patronage of the 
government. They believed that on the inevitable disintegration 
of the American party, which had been a temporary refuge for 
the undecided, the majority of Fillmore's 874,534 votes would 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 501 



be theirs. They closed their ranks after the defeat and pre- 
pared anew for the battle, cheered by Whittier's marching-song: 

If months have well-nigh won the field, 
What may not four years do ! 

Buchanan was inaugurated on the fourth of March, 1857. 
Two days later the Supreme Court handed down the most 
famous decision in its history. The facts in the case were as 
follows. In 1834 an army surgeon stationed at St. Louis had 
moved, pursuant to the orders of the government, first to Rock 
Island, Illinois, then across the Mississippi to Fort Snelling, in 
the Louisiana Purchase territory. He took with him his negro 
slave. Bred Scott. Some years after the return to Missouri 
Bred Scott sued for his freedom on the ground that residence 
in a free state and on territory made free by the Missouri Com- 
promise had released him from bondage. His suit was granted 
by a lower state court at St. Louis, but the decision was reversed 
by the supreme court of Missouri (1852). Meantime Scott had 
been transferred to a new master, John Sandford of New York, 
and proceeded to bring suit for his freedom in the federal circuit 
court of Missouri, as a citizen of one state against a citizen 
of another state. The court heard the case, thereby virtually 
conceding that Scott was a citizen of Missouri, but the decision 
of the jury was adverse to the negro. He was remanded to the 
status of a slave. Then the case was taken to the Supreme 
Court of the United States, on a writ of error, and argued in 
the spring and the winter terms of 1856.^ 

The Supreme Court had only one question to decide : Bid 
the circuit court in Missouri err in its decision remanding Bred 
Scott to slavery? And in its argument it was bound legally 
to review only testimony on record in the circuit court. But 
the majority of the Supreme Court justices were Southerners, 
and at the instigation of Justice Wayne of Georgia they pro- 
ceeded to render a decision covering the whole question of 

^Of course the negro slave was not the author of all this litigation. A 
Mr. Roswell Field, a stanch antislavery lawyer from Vermont, gave his services 
gratis and secured the cooperation of Montgomery Blair in the federal courts. 



502 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



negro citizenship and the status of slaves in the territories. 
They thought to put a quietus on the slavery controversy by 
the judgment of the highest tribunal in the land. Consequently 
Chief Justice Taney read a long and labored decision, as the 
majority opinion of the court, declaring that the negro was 
not a citizen in the view of the framers of the Constitution and 
that Congress had no power to make him such ; that the circuit 
court of Missouri, therefore, had no jurisdiction in the case; 
that the laws of Missouri, not Illinois, decided Scott's condition 
so far as residence in states was concerned, and that, slaves 
being property, the Constitution protected their owners in all 
the territories of the Union. The Missouri Compromise, there- 
fore, was unconstitutional. The regulation of slavery was be- 
yond the power of the national government. Only when a 
territory became a state could it decide for or against the 
institution. 

All of this famous opinion that went beyond the simple order 
to the circuit court in Missouri to dismiss the case for lack of 
jurisdiction — all the disquisition on the historical status of the 
negro and on the power of Congress over slavery in the terri- 
tories — was beside the point, an obiter dictum, or volunteered 
commentary. It was a glaring example of the most debasing 
action that the judiciary can commit; namely, of lending its 
high and impartial authority to a political cause. And it added 
enormously to the indignation which the Kansas-Nebraska Act 
had aroused in the North. The strong dissenting opinions of 
Justices Curtis and McLean were accepted as the sound law in 
the case throughout the free states. 

Each of the three departments of our government had now 
committed itself to the support of slavery and sanctioned the 
annulment of the Missouri Compromise. President Pierce had 
been subservient to the slave interests since the beginning of 
his administration. He had given his consent to the Douglas 
legislation and supported the fraudulent proslavery legislature 
of Kansas. In his last annual message, as in his first, he had 
rebuked the free-soil agitators and charged the North with 
"revolutionary assaults on the South's domestic institution." 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELE 503 



Congress had opened the vast Louisiana Purchase territory- 
north of 36° 30' to slavery. And, finally, the Supreme Court 
had set the seal of the most august authority in the land on 
this policy of the nationalization of slavery, making the insti- 
tution legal in every part of the country where it was not 
positively excluded by the municipal law of the states. The 
fathers had spared slavery, in the belief that it was an evil 
doomed to eventual extinction. The compromisers had suffered 
it below the 36° 30' line, or conceded its theoretic right to go 
into the arid lands of New Mexico, in the conviction that the 
dedication of the major part of the territory of the United 
States to freedom would inevitably bring into the Union a suc- 
cession of free states, leaving slavery to stagnate in a narrowing 
sectional area. But in the middle years of the decade 1850- 
1860 the slave power broke down the barriers of a generation 
and got the sanction of president, Congress, and Supreme Court 
for its claims to legal status in all our territory from the Gulf 
of Mexico to the Canadian border. The Southern leaders 
declared that henceforth slavery should be national and freedom 
sectional. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was their 
defiant proclamation against any further humiliation by ter- 
ritorial restrictions or moral aspersions. It was a challenge to 
the free North, and it made the Civil War inevitable. 



Secession 

Like his predecessor, Buchanan began his term of office with 
the optimistic prediction that the end of the slavery agitation 
was in sight and that the country would soon happily return to 
questions of greater interest and importance. But like his prede- 
cessor he also made it evident from the start that the way of 
return was to be the path designated by the leaders of the South. 
No slightest sympathy or indulgence was shown for the anti- 
slavery position. The cabinet, though far inferior to Pierce's, 
was as decidedly Southern in cast. The senile indolence of Lewis 
Cass took the place of Marcy's alert and efficient conduct of the 
Department of State. Howell Cobb of Georgia, who was con- 



504 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



sidered the master spirit in the cabinet, brought only disorder 
and deficit into the Treasury Department, which had been 
managed with surpassing skill by Guthrie of Kentucky. John B. 
Floyd of Virginia, in the War Department, was a sorry substi- 
tute for Jefferson Davis, who resumed his seat in the Senate 
to become the most able and eloquent advocate of the demands 
of the South. Neither Douglas nor any of his prominent sup- 
porters had a place in the cabinet, and in the distribution of 
the patronage the Northern Democracy was conspicuously 
neglected. 

The first important crisis of the administration showed 
Buchanan to be a man of neither courage nor consistency. 
Strife in Kansas, as we have seen, had been allayed by the 
liberal employment of the federal authority (p. 499). But 
Governor Geary, like the men who had preceded him, found that 
a policy of conciliation in Kansas was met with suspicion by 
the free-state men, who mistrusted any agent of the administra- 
tion which had supported the Shawnee legislature, and that an 
impartial policy was met with hostility by the proslavery men, 
who, as they dwindled from month to month in the face of the 
increasing migration from the free states, relied more and more 
on force to carry out their program. They played their last 
desperate card in the autumn of 1857. A convention called by 
the Shawnee legislature met at Lecompton to frame a consti- 
tution for Kansas. Since the convention had been called over 
the governor's veto and the elections to it were not based on 
a fair census, the free-state men refused to participate. The 
result was the choice of a unanimous proslavery convention by 
less than one eighth of the voters of the territory. In October, 
however, the free-state men (persuaded by Buchanan's new 
governor, Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, that the adminis- 
tration would deal fairly with Kansas) came to the polls and 
elected a majority of the new territorial legislature. The con- 
vention had adjourned to await the result of this election. Cer- 
tain now that they could not get a proslavery constitution 
adopted by a fair vote in the territory, the members of the 
Lecompton convention resorted to a shabby trick. They com- 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 505 



posed a constitution containing an article which declared the 
right to slave property and its increase inviolable and denied 
the prospective state the power to emancipate slaves without the 
consent of their owners or to prevent their entrance into the 
state/ It was this clause alone that was submitted to the people 
of the territory in December. A vote for the constitution ^%ith 
slavery" would mean adopting the above-mentioned article; 
a vote for the constitution ^ Without slavery" would mean re- 
jecting it and prohibiting the entrance of slaves into the state. 
But a vote either way would mean the protection of the slave 
property already in Kansas, which was guaranteed in the body 
of the constitution. The chance to accept or reject the consti- 
tution as a whole — the only fair application of Douglas's doc- 
trine of popular sovereignty" — was not given to the people. 
Under these circumstances the free-state men naturally refused 
to vote in December, and the constitution ^Vith slavery" was 
adopted by 6226 votes (nearly half of which were fraudulent) 
to 629. The next month (January 4, 1858) the new anti- 
slavery legislature submitted the Lecompton Constitution as a 
whole to the voters of Kansas, who rejected it by the over- 
whelming majority of 10,226 to 162. It was clear enough that 
a majority of the people of the territory wanted neither more 
slaves in Kansas nor those that were already there. 

Now Buchanan had given ample assurance of his intention 
to deal fairly with Kansas. He had authorized his friend J. W. 
Forney, the Democratic manager in Pennsylvania, to make 
pledges to that effect in the critical campaign for the presidential 
election in that state.^ He had prevailed on Walker to go to 
Kansas as governor by the promise of support in an impartial 
policy. As late as July, 1857, he wrote to Walker, ^'On the 

1 Another article forbade any amendment whatever of the constitution for 
seven years and prohibited forever any amendment which affected the "rights 
of property in the ownership of slaves." 

2 Rhodes (Vol. 11, p. 229, note) quotes Forney in the New York Tribune of 
September 3, 1858, as follows: "There is not a county in Pennsylvania in which 
my letters may not be found, almost by hundreds, pledging Mr. Buchanan, in 
his name and by his authority, to the full, complete, and practical recognition 
of the rights of the people of Kansas to decide upon their own affairs." 



5o6 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



question of submitting the constitution to the bona fide resident 
settlers of Kansas, I am willing to stand or fall." Yet when 
he sent in his first annual message in December he had yielded 
completely to the pressure from the Southern politicians. He 
declared that the Lecompton Constitution was legal, that the 
forthcoming vote on it would be held under legitimate author- 
ity, and that if any part of the inhabitants refused to vote, it 
would be their own voluntary act and they alone would be 
responsible for the consequences. When the result of the 
fraudulent vote in Kansas reached Washington, Buchanan sent 
the Lecompton Constitution to Congress (February 2, 1858) 
with a special message recommending the admission of Kansas 
to the Union under its provisions. He condemned as ^^treason- 
able" the refusal of the free-state men to vote on it. This 
change of front he made (as he afterward confessed to Forney) 
because certain Southern states had threatened that if he did 
not abandon Walker [who resigned in disgust on December 15] 
they would be compelled either to secede from the Union or 
take up arms against him." A more craven deed was never 
committed by a chief magistrate of the United States. 

Douglas protested vigorously against this travesty of popular 
sovereignty in Kansas and rebuked President Buchanan to his 
face. When the Lecompton Bill came before the Senate, Douglas 
was found voting with strange poHtical bedfellows, — Hale, 
Seward, Wade, and Chase, — in the negative. Still, the bill to 
admit Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution passed the 
Senate on May 23, by a vote of 33 to 25. It was defeated in 
the House a few days later. The scheme to force slavery on 
Kansas against the wishes of a very large majority of its settlers 
having failed in Congress, a final attempt was made to bribe 
the people of Kansas to accept the constitution of their own 
will. William H. English of Indiana introduced a bill into the 
House, called the ^'Lecompton Junior," which provided that 
the whole Lecompton Constitution should be resubmitted to the 
people, and that its adoption should carry with it a large grant 
of public lands to the state, while its rejection should postpone 
any further bill for the admission of Kansas until the population 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 507 



of the territory should reach the federal ratio of 93,000 in- 
habitants. The English Bill passed the House. But even then 
the double stimulus of a bribe and a penalty failed to induce 
the people of Kansas to accept the proslavery constitution. The 
plebiscite on August 2, 1858, resulted in a vote of 1926 for the 
constitution and 11^812 against it. So Kansas remained a 
territory, theoretically open to slavery by the Dred Scott 
decision but actually closed to it by the increasing preponder- 
ance of free-soil inhabitants, until the withdrawal from Congress 
of the members from the Southern states on the eve of the Civil 
War. On January 21, 1861, the turbulent seven years' history 
of the Kansas Territory came to a close with its quiet admission 
to the Union as a free state. 

Already, before the final rejection of the Lecompton Consti- 
tution by the people of Kansas, the attention of the country 
was drawn to an exciting contest in another Western state. 
Douglas's second term in the Senate was about to expire, and 
he returned to Illinois in the summer of 1858 to make his can- 
vass for reelection. He was the most popular man in the country 
above Mason and Dixon's hne. The Northern Democrats were 
with him to a man for his courageous opposition to the admin- 
istration in the Lecompton affair. Many of the Republicans, 
even, favored his return to the Senate by the legislature of Illi- 
nois, believing that his complete breach with the Buchanan ad- 
ministration would make him a more effective foe to the slave 
interests and a more disruptive force in the Democratic party 
than any Republican whom they could nominate. Even Horace 
Greeley, in the New York Tribune, urged the Republicans of 
Illinois not to put up a candidate against Douglas. But the 
more clear-sighted Republicans were under no illusion that 
Douglas would come over to their position. They applauded 
his stand on the Lecompton Bill ; but they knew that the man 
who had engineered the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, who 
expressed his hearty concurrence in the Dred Scott decision, and 
who repeatedly declared that he didn't care whether slavery 
was voted up or voted down," so long as the people concerned 
voted honestly, could never be indorsed by a party whose f unda- 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



mental tenet was opposition to the extension of slavery in the 
territories of the United States. So the Republicans nominated 
Abraham Lincoln to oppose Douglas in the campaign to win the 
legislature which was to choose the United States Senator 
from Illinois. 

Lincoln, like Douglas, was a self-made man, born in poverty 
to a life of toil. Like Douglas he had moved to Illinois as a youth 
and had engaged in the practice of law. But the career of the 
two equally ambitious men was most unequal. While Douglas 
had rapidly attained high political honors in the state and 
served two terms in the House and two in the Senate at Wash- 
ington, — always prominent, and since the death of Clay and Web- 
ster preeminent, — Lincoln's public honors had been limited 
to a few years in the Illinois legislature and a single term 
(184 7-1 849) in the House of Representatives. Although he 
rose steadily to be one of the best lawyers in Illinois, Lincoln 
became reluctantly convinced that Fortune had reserved all 
her favors for the Little Giant,'' whom he had looked on as 
his rival for years. He confessed that he ^Vas beginning to 
lose interest in poHtics," when the repeal of the Missouri Com- 
promise roused him. Slavery had always been abhorrent to 
him. As early as 1837 he had protested, with one lone com- 
panion in the Illinois legislature, against a resolution that the 
right of property in slaves was sacred" in the Southern states. 
He then placed on the records his opinion that slavery was 
founded on both injustice and bad policy." During his term 
in Congress he had voted over and over again for the Wilmot 
Proviso. He now became an enthusiastic member of the new Re- 
publican party. By the summer of 1858 he was the most prom- 
inent Republican in Illinois, although outside of the state he was 
known, if at all, only as a clever lawyer with an inexhausti- 
ble repertoire of humorous stories, not always free from coarse- 
ness, and a rather melancholy and meditative nature, which was 
kindled to a clear, intense purpose by the appeal of injured inno- 
cence or the threatened triumph of injustice. 

In his speech of acceptance of the nomination for the senator- 
ship, before the delegates of the state convention at Springfield, 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 



June 1 6, 1858, Lincoln stated the issue of the campaign with 
force and clearness: ^'We are now far into the fifth year since 
a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident 
promise of putting an end to the slavery agitation. Under the 
operation of that policy the agitation has not only not ceased, 
but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease 
until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. house 
divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe that this govern- 
ment cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do 
not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house 
to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. Either the 
opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and 
place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is 
in the course of ultimate extinction ; or its advocates will push 
it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old 
as well as new — North as well as South." Three weeks later 
Douglas was welcomed home with a magnificent reception in 
Chicago and began his canvass of the state in a special train 
gaily decorated. He knew in his heart that he had a dangerous 
antagonist in Lincoln, but he affected to treat him with patroniz- 
ing condescension, as ^^a kind, amiable and intelligent gen- 
tleman." With characteristic effrontery he misrepresented 
Lincoln's prophecy of the cessation of the divided house as a 
plea for ^'a war of the sections until one or the other shall be sub- 
dued," and intimated that Lincoln's criticism of the Dred Scott 
case was an appeal from the decision of the Supreme Court of 
the land ^'to the decision of a tumultuous town meeting." 

After several attempts to correct the persistent misrepresen- 
tations of his opponent, in a kind of hide-and-seek game, Lincoln 
suggested that they discuss the subject of slavery from the same 
platform in a series of joint debates. Seven towns were sched- 
uled in different sections of the state. The debates were begun 
at Ottawa in August and closed at Alton, the scene of Love- 
joy's murder, in October. The rivals spoke from a platform in 
the open air, before thousands, who turned out from all the 
houses in the towns and drove miles in buggies and carryalls 
from the farms around. But the real audience extended far 



510 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



beyond the limits of Illinois. New England followed the de- 
bates with eager interest. Long extracts from the speeches were 
published in the papers of St. Louis, New York, and Cincinnati. 
The administration at Washington, on the other hand, for whom 
Douglas was a rebel and Lincoln a crude country lawyer, re- 
garded the whole affair as a rather disreputable exhibition 
by ^^a pair of depraved, blustering, mischievous, low-down 
demagogues." 

At first Lincoln appeared at a disadvantage, ^Vith his thin 
voice, his awkward figure, his yellow dry-wrinkled face, his 
oddity of pose and his diffident movements," in contrast with 
Douglas's easy bearing and confident eloquence. But as the 
debates proceeded Lincoln's clarity of reasoning and honesty 
of mind told more and more against his rival's skill in debate. 
The directness of his answers to Douglas's questions and the 
searching character of the questions which he put to Doug- 
las converted the latter's aggressiveness into defense. Lincoln 
showed the speciousness of Douglas's contention that slavery 
was one of those local institutions" whose variety was one of 
the surest bonds of our Union. Slavery had never been any- 
thing but a source of strife, and the doctrine of popular sov- 
ereignty had been ^^a living, creeping lie from the time of its 
introduction till today." The fathers" had not anticipated 
a permanent Union half slave and half free. They had endured 
slavery only because they had believed that it was destined ere 
long to pass away. It was not the abolitionists, as Douglas 
maintained, who had raised all the pother about slavery in 
the territories. It was Douglas himself, by his wanton repeal 
of the Missouri Compromise. ^^Why could you not leave 
slavery alone?" asked Lincoln. 

He asked Douglas another question in the debate at Freeport, 
which made national history. ^^Can the people of a United 
States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wishes of any 
citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its hmits, 
prior to the formation of a state constitution?" If Douglas 
answered No, he would deny his pet doctrine of popular sov- 
ereignty ; if he answered Yes, he would antagonize the dominant 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 



politicians of the South, led by Jefferson Davis, who maintained 
that the only power that could deal with slavery was the 
municipal law of a state, and furthermore he would set the local 
authority of the territory above the Supreme Court, which 
had declared slavery legal in all the territories of the United 
States by the Bred Scott decision. Douglas answered the ques- 
tion in the affirmative and tried to wriggle out of the trap by 
declaring that although slavery might be "legal" in a territory, 
it could not actually exist for a day or an hour where the peo- 
ple enacted legislation "unfriendly" to it. That was the famous 
"Freeport Doctrine." It was a poor answer from the point 
of view of logic and was neatly paraphrased by Lincoln in 
the paradox that a thing might then be legally excluded from 
a place where it had a legal right to exist. But from the point 
of view of expediency it was the only answer that Douglas 
could give. For to deny the doctrine of popular sovereignty, 
which was emblazoned all over the state as his great invention, 
would have meant his sure defeat for the Illinois senatorship. 
Lincoln was looking beyond the Illinois senatorship, much as 
he wanted it. He knew that the answer which won that honor 
for Douglas would lose him the greater honor of the presidency 
of the United States. For the Southern Democracy, which had 
voted for Douglas's bill in 1854 for the sake of annulHng the 
Missouri Compromise, had now advanced, under the encourage- 
ment of the Dred Scott decision, to the position that the national 
government should positively protect slavery, as it protected 
property generally, in all the common territories of the United 
States. Douglas won the senatorship by the narrow margin 
of eight votes in the Illinois legislature. Lincoln won a reputa- 
tion throughout the North as the most able defender of the 
free-soil cause. After all, the climax of the contest was not 
the clever challenge to Douglas at Freeport but the fine ethical 
note struck by Lincoln in the closing debate at Alton : "Where 
is the philosophy or statesmanship based on the assumption 
that we are to quit talking about slavery and that the public 
mind is all at once to cease being agitated about it? Yet this 
is the policy that Douglas is advocating. ... I ask you if it 



512 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

is not a false philosophy. Is it not a false statesmanship that 
undertakes to build up a policy upon the basis of caring nothing 
about the very thing that everybody does care most about ? . . . 
That is the issue which will continue in this country when the 
poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It 
is the eternal struggle between two principles, Right and Wrong, 
throughout the world." 

The elections of the autumn of 1858 saw decisive gains for the 
Republicans and the antiadministration Democrats. The for- 
mer won 21 seats in the House, where, by coalition with the 
" Know-No things," they could outvote the Democrats. This re- 
sult must be taken as a condemnation by the North of the Le- 
compton fraud, although the victory of the Republicans in 
Buchanan's own state was due largely to economic causes ; for 
the low nonpartisan tariff of 1857 had hit the iron interests of 
Pennsylvania hard, and a severe financial panic which broke on 
the country in the autumn of 1857 brought its inevitable reac- 
tion against the administration. The panic was due to overspec- 
ulation, overextension of credit, the inflation of the currency by 
great quantities of gold found in California and Austraha, and 
the excessive conversion of fluid capital into fixed capital in 
railroads, factories, and public works. The remarkable pros- 
perity of the country, which we studied in the first section of 
this chapter, lasted for a full decade — from the passage of the 
Walker tariff in 1846 to the end of Pierce's administration. Our 
population increased from 23,000,000 to 30,000,000, the rate 
of increase in the cities being 78 per cent. In 1850 there were 
some 6000 miles of railroads, in short stretches of seldom more 
than 100 miles. It was impossible to go from New York to 
Boston or Albany without breaking the journey. Ten years 
later the mileage had increased to over 30,000, and New York 
was linked to points west of the Mississippi. Nearly 80 per 
cent of the total mileage of the country on the eve of the Civil 
War had been laid within a decade, at a cost of $700,000,000. 
^Tremature railroads at the West,"says Schouler,^'had fostered 
premature cities, teeming with premature traffic for premature 
population." The customary wave of extravagant living fol- 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 



lowed flush times. We went heavily in debt to Europe for im- 
ported luxuries. In the nine years from the discovery of gold 
in California to the outbreak of the panic the excess of imports 
over exports of merchandise was $336,000,000, and the excess 
of exports over imports of specie was I2 71,000,000. The liquid 
capital that was not being converted into fixed forms was go- 
ing to Europe to pay our debts. The crash came in October, 
when the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company of Cincinnati 
failed for $7,000,000. Large business houses, banks, and fac- 
tories closed their doors. Hundreds of thousands of men in the 
North and West were thrown out of employment, while in- 
flated prices caused untold suffering.^ 

The panic of 1857 contributed not a little to the tension 
between the sections. While the Northern industries were 
paralyzed, the cotton crops of the South were large, the prices 
were well sustained, an:d the exports were mounting. ^'Cotton is 
King ! " cried Hammond of South Carolina in the Senate. 

When you came to a deadlock and revolutions were threatened 
. . . we poured in on you 1,600,000 bales of cotton just at the 
crisis to save you."- ^'The wealth of the South," said De Bow, 
in his famous Review, ^4s permanent and real : that of the North 
is fugitive and fictitious." If anything was needed to confirm 
the South in its conviction that slavery was an economic blessing 
to be nurtured and extended at all costs, it was just this bitter 
experience of the North in 1857. Only the Southerners made 
the mistake of taking a temporary embarrassment for the break- 
down of a whole industrial system. 

There were many signs in the Congress which convened in 
December, 1858, that the South meant to brook no further 
restrictions on its peculiar institution. Frustrated in the hope 
of making Kansas a slave state, the South turned longing eyes 

1 Mayor Wood of New York recommended that the city purchase 50,000 bar- 
rels of flour and large quantities of provisions to be sold to the workmen at cost. 
Thousands of the unemployed marched in processions, bearing banners demand- 
ing work and bread, or met in mass meetings to denounce "the rich who lived 
at ease while the workers starved." It was deemed necessary to bring soldiers 
from Governor's Island to guard the Subtreasury building in Wall Street. 



514 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



on Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. Slidell of Louisiana in- 
troduced a bill into the Senate appropriating $30,000,000 for 
negotiations with Spain for the purchase of Cuba, but in spite 
of the support of the administration he failed to get the bill 
through. Buchanan himself had asked Congress to support this 
project, speaking in his message of 1858, in language which re- 
called the Ostend Manifesto of four years before, of ^'circum- 
stances which might make the seizure of Cuba justifiable under 
the law of self-preservation.'' The President also favored a 
protectorate over the northern part of Mexico and in 1859 
actually suggested an invasion of the country for the sake of 
restoring order." Leading Southerners, like Alexander H. 
Stephens of Georgia, were outspoken in their sympathy for 
WilHam Walker, a noted filibusterer, who in 1856 had inter- 
vened in the civil wars of Nicaragua, expelled the dictator Rivas, 
and made himself president of the republic. When Walker 
was arrested by an American naval officer and brought to 
the United States to be tried for the infraction of the neutrality 
laws, no jury could be found in New Orleans to convict him. 
Of course the interest in Spanish America, under whatever form 
of benevolent assimilation" it was disguised, was the quest for 
new slave lands. These plans came to naught, but the boldest 
of all the schemes of the Southern oligarchy was the reopening 
of the foreign slave trade. A commercial convention at Vicks- 
burg, in May, 1859, resolved by a vote of 49 to 19 that "all 
laws, state or national, forbidding the African slave trade, ought 
to be repealed." It cost the planter from Si 500 to $2000 to buy 
a first-class negro in Virginia or Kentucky, while he might 
have plenty from the Guinea coast for one third of that price. 
A score of American slavers were reported off the coast of Africa 
in the closing years of the decade, and when they brought their 
cargoes openly into the Southern ports, in defiance of the pro- 
hibition of 1808 and the Piracy Act of 1820, the juries refused 
to condemn their captains or owners. Hammond confessed in 
the Senate that the sentiment of his section was "not in accord 
with the laws of the United States on this subject." And 
Douglas is the authority for the statement that during the year 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 515 



1859 no less than i5;OOo African slaves were landed in the 
Southern states. 

Every public question came now to be treated in Congress 
solely from the standpoint of its bearing on the great sectional 
issue. When the Northerners tried to get a Pacific railroad bill 
passed, Iverson of Georgia frankly acknowledged his belief that 
the Union would soon be divided, and refused to vote for a road 
which would lie outside a Southern confederacy." When a 
Homestead Bill, granting Western lands to settlers on easy 
terms, was passed by the House (with only three favorable 
votes from the slaveholding states), it was shelved in the Senate. 
The Southerners saw in this measure giving ^'land to the land- 
less" only national encouragement to the free-state emigration 
which had robbed them of Kansas. As the sectional strife grew 
more bitter, the tone of the debates grew more menacing: ex- 
postulation and protest stiffened into the demand of the ulti- 
matum. Concession was looked on askance as incipient treason 
to the section. The press was unbridled in its language of 
vituperation. Sheets like the Richmond Enquirer and De Bow's 
Review spoke of the Northerners as if they were already the 
inhabitants of a hostile foreign country, calling them ^'the worst 
bigots on earth" and ^Hhe meanest of tyrants, who had never 
had the slightest conception of what constitutes true liberty." 

Before the new Congress assembled in December, 1859 (the 
last Congress for more than a decade in which all the states of 
the Union were represented), an event occurred which was mag- 
nified far beyond its intrinsic importance, owing to the tense, 
nervous condition of the country. John Brown, the sinister 
hero of the Pottawatomie murders, brooding on his commission 
from God to put an end to slavery, conceived the wild scheme ot 
carrying the war into the enemy's country with an ^'army" of 
nineteen men. His plan was to establish camps in the Piedmont 
region of the Appalachians, whence his followers could conduct 
raids on the neighboring plantations, to incite the slaves to 
desert their masters and join the ranks of freedom. Money 
and arms for this undertaking were fraudulently collected in 
the North, under the disguise of a renewed expedition against 



5i6 THE UNITED STATES OF AJ^IERICA 



the slaveholders in Kansas. Not more than four or five "choice 
friends" were in the secret of Brown's real purpose, although 
rumors began to get abroad in the summer of 1859, and the 
Secretary of War, Floyd, received an anonymous letter from 
Cincinnati, in August, warning him of the whole plot. 

On the night of October 16 Brown's little band seized the 
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad bridge crossing from the Mary- 
land side of the Potomac to the Virginia village of Harpers 
Ferry. They cut the telegraph wires, occupied the United 
States arsenal, and began their campaign of liberation by visit- 
ing the plantation of Colonel Lewis Washington at the dead of 
night, arresting the owner, and inviting his bewildered negroes 
to join the banners of freedom. The next morning the citizens 
of Harpers Ferry seized their arms. Brown, cut off from re- 
treat to the Ivlaryland side, barricaded himself with his followers 
and his hostages in the engine house in the armory yard, where 
he conducted a desperate defense. Colonel Robert E. Lee 
arrived on the scene in the evening with a band of United 
States marines, and on the morning of the eighteenth, when 
Brown refused to surrender, they battered down the doors of 
the engine house. Brown himself^ severely wounded, and four 
of his followers were taken prisoners. Ten of his men had been 
killed in the siege." The other four escaped. Brown was 
promptly tried in a Virginia court, found guilty of treason, and 
publicly hanged on December 2, manifesting the utmost com- 
posure to the end. Armed invasion in Virginia, like stealthy 
murder in Kansas, was ^'the Lord's work" in his eyes. Legality 
had no meaning for him. Prudence and failure were words 
unknown in his vocabular}^ John Brown's raid at Harpers 
Ferry was a pitiable escapade of a fanatic with a handful of 
h}TDnotized satellites. But seen through the distorting medium 
of sectional hostility it assumed in the Southerners' eyes the 
dimensions of a widespread plot to incite a slave rebelhon, sup- 
ported and encouraged by the Republican leaders; while men 
as sane as Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Thoreau at the 
North glorified John Brown as a martyr and even compared him 
to Christ on the cross. 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 517 

The year i860 was the most fateful in our history, for it saw 
the house divided against itself. In the Congress which met 
three days after John Brown was hanged the Democrats still 
had a majority in the slowly changing Senate (37 to 26), but in 
the House there were 109 Republicans, 1 01 Democrats (of whom 
13 were against the administration), 26 ^'Know-Nothings/' 
and one Whig. The contest for the Speakership was an eight 
weeks' battle between the sections north and south of Mason 
and Dixon's Hne. John Sherman of Ohio was the most promi- 
nent Repubhcan candidate, but failed of election because he 
had allowed his name to be used in the indorsement of a book 
entitled, ^'The Impending Crisis of the South, and How to Meet 
It," written by Hilton R. Helper, a poor white of North Carolina. 
While Uncle Tom's Cabin" had attacked slavery in behalf 
of the abused negro. Helper's book denounced the oligarchy of 
the slaveholders as fatal to the progress of the millions of whites 
of the middle and lower classes in the South. Slavery must go 
in order to give the whites their rightful place in the economic 
and social life of the section, to introduce a varied industry and 
commerce, to foster thriving cities and free schools. It would 
have been a far more dangerous book than Uncle Tom's Cabin" 
for the slave-holders, had the class for whom it was written been 
able to read its arguments and comprehend its statistics. Its 
chief use was as a campaign document in the North, where it 
was widely circulated. Its indorsement by prominent Repub- 
licans was regarded by the South as an insult. 

As the battle for the Speakership lengthened, the passions 
on each side grew fiercer. The Southerners charged Northern 
statesmen of the highest standing, like William H. Seward, with 
complicity in John Brown's raid. The Northerners met threats 
of disunion either with scorn, or with grim sarcasm as to the 
obvious disparity between ^'eighteen millions of men reared to 
industry, with habits of the right kind" and ''eight millions of 
men without these auxiliaries." Taunts and insults were ex- 
changed. Challenges to duels followed. Several times the 
House seemed on the point of indulging in a general fight. 
Senator Hammond wrote to Francis Lieber, in April, i860, 



5i8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



^^As I believe, every man in both Houses is armed with a 
revolver — some with two — and a bowie knife.'' ^ The repre- 
sentatives from North and South to the Congress of the common 
Union met rather in the spirit of the mutually suspicious delega- 
tions from the camps of Caesar and Ariovistus ! 

On the first of February, i860, Pennington of New Jersey 
was elected Speaker on the forty-fourth ballot. The next day 
Jefferson Davis presented in the Senate a set of resolutions 
which embodied the ultimatum of the radical leaders of the 
South and were intended as a platform on which any candidate 
for the presidential nomination in the coming Democratic con- 
vention must stand in order to be acceptable to the slaveholders. 
The Davis resolutions affirmed Calhoun's doctrine of state 
sovereignty, called upon Congress to protect slavery in the ter- 
ritories, demanded the faithful execution of the Fugitive-Slave 
Act, and denounced Douglas's Freeport Doctrine by declaring 
that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature, by direct 
or indirect legislation, has the power to annul or impair the 
constitutional right of any citizen to take his slave property 
into the common territories and there hold and enjoy the same 
while the territorial condition remains." 

The South had spoken through the mouth of the statesman 
who was destined in another twelvemonth to be called to preside 
over her fortunes as an independent confederacy. The answer 
from the North came from the man who was destined to bear 
the enormous responsibility for preserving the Union. Abra- 
ham Lincoln's fame had been growing steadily since his debates 
with Douglas. He had spoken frequently before large audiences 
in the Western states, but was not heard in the East until the 
Young Men's Republican Club of New York invited him, early 
in i860, to speak in the great hall of Cooper Union. As he faced 

1 Thirty-five years later Mr. Grow of Pennsylvania, one of the candidates for 
Speaker in the exciting contest of 1859-1860, said to Frederick Bancroft: "Dur- 
ing the period just before the War, every member [of Congress] intended to take 
his revolver as his hat when he went to the Capitol. For some time, a New 
Englander who had formerly been a clergyman was the only exception. There 
was much quiet jesting in the House when it became known that he too had 
purchased a pistol " (Bancroft, " Life of Seward," Vol. I. p. 503) . 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 519 



his distinguished audience on the evening of February 27, his 
uncouth appearance in ill-fitting clothes, his awkward gestures 
and high-pitched voice, at first created an unfavorable im- 
pression. But this disappeared rapidly as he proceeded with 
masterly logic and burning conviction to unfold his thesis of 
the consonance of the Republican doctrine with the spirit and 
purpose of the men who founded the American State. He 
denied that it was the North who had brought the question of 
slavery into a new and dangerous prominence. It was the South, 
with its mounting demands, with its threat to destroy the gov- 
ernment unless allowed to construe and enforce the Consti- 
tution as it pleased," with its deterniination to ^^rule orTuin,'' 
with its ultimatum to the North ^'to cease to call slavery -wrong 
and join [them] in calling it right." He concluded with a 
strong appeal to the party to stand by its principles in spite of 
false accusations. ^Tet us have faith that right makes might, 
and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we 
understand it." 

The Democratic nominating convention met at Charleston, 
April 23. Douglas was the unanimous choice of the Northern 
wing of the party, but his Freeport Doctrine had killed him 
in the South. He was regarded by the Davis following as no 
better than Seward — worse even, because he was a renegade. 
The committee on platform, by a vote of 17 to 16, adopted 
the Southern program condemning the doctrine of popular 
sovereignty. But the convention as a whole, in which the 
Northern delegates had a decided majority, rejected the plat- 
form and supported Douglas by a vote of 165 to 138. There- 
upon the Alabama delegation, headed by William L. Yancey, 
reputed the first orator and the most decided disunionist of 
the South, left the hall. The majority of the delegates from 
Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Ar- 
kansas, and Georgia followed amid intense excitement, bidding 
good-by to their Northern colleagues in speeches of pathetic 
warning and dire prophecy. Only 253 delegates were left, and 
as a two-thirds majority of the whole convention was necessary 
to the choice of a candidate, Douglas failed to get the nomina- 




o 



Electoral Popular 
Vote Vote 



In Free In Slave 
States States 



Lincoln 180 1.866.452 1.840.022 - 26.430 

Breckinridge 72 849,781 279.728 570,053 

Bell 39 588,879 72,906 515.973 

Douglas 12 1.376,957 1,212,432 164.525 



Circles in each state show vote of candidate 

receiving largest minority 
Numbers' in parenthesis in each state show 

electoral vote 



\ 



47,548 



y 



\ 



\ 



Map Plate, rstented July 5, ly2l 



Method of Making Maps, Patented July 5, 1921 



520 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



tion in 57 ballots. On May 3 the convention adjourned, to 
reassemble at Baltimore on June 18. The bolting radicals of 
the South thus chose deliberately to split the great Democratic 
party and virtually assure the election of a RepubHcan presi- 
dent rather than abide by the Douglas doctrine, which they had 
enthusiastically indorsed in their Cincinnati platform four years 
before. In June the convention at Baltimore nominated Doug- 
las and Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia as the regular Demo- 
cratic ticket, while the bolters, meeting in the same city, named 
John Breckinridge of Kentucky and Joseph Lane of Oregon. 

Meanwhile two other tickets had been placed in the field. 
The remnants of the old Whig party, joined by the ^^Know- 
Nothings," met at Baltimore, on May 9, as the Constitutional 
Union party and nominated John Bell of Tennessee and Edward 
Everett of Massachusetts on a platform which sought to allay 
the bitter struggle over slavery by ignoring its cause. Their 
brief declaration consisted of three platitudes: ^^The Consti- 
tution of the country, the Union of the states, and the enforce- 
ment of the laws." Such a party at such a crisis could serve 
only as a refuge for the halting and the unconvinced. 

The Republicans met at Chicago, on May 16, in a huge 
structure called the Wigwam." Ten thousand people crowded 
into the hall, and other tens of thousands flocked to the city 
to clamor in vain for admission. It was generally expected that 
William H. Seward would be the nominee. He was the leader of 
the party in Congress and the most prominent exponent of the 
Republican principles in the country. It was to him that the 
Southern statesmen referred when they threatened disunion 
in case of the election of a Black Republican President." But 
there were points in Seward's record which injured his avail- 
ability. He was in the closest intimacy with Thurlow Weed, 
a powerful political manager in Albany, who was suspected of 
a deal with the traction companies of New York City to raise 
huge sums for the Republican campaign ; ^ and he had the en- 

1 Seward's noisy supporters paraded the streets of Chicago with bands and 
banners, shouting, "If you do not nominate Seward, where will you get your 
money ?" 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 521 



mity of the influential Horace Greeley, of the New York Trib- 
une, whose support was given to Edward Bates, a conserva- 
tive Republican from the border state of Missouri. Again, 
Seward^s intense hostility to the Know-Nothings" weakened 
him in the doubtful state of Pennsylvania, where the remnants 
of that party were still strong. And, most serious of all^ Seward 
had delivered a famous speech at Rochester, in October, 1858, 
on ^'The Irrepressible Conflict," in which he had spoken of a 
^^higher law" than the Constitution — a position more radical 
than Lincoln's house divided against itself." 

Seward led, however, on the first ballot, with 173^ votes to 
102 for Lincoln, 50^ for Cameron of Pennsylvania, 49 for 
Governor Chase of Ohio, 48 for Bates of Missouri, and 42 scat- 
tering. On the next ballot Seward had 184^ to 181 for Lincoln. 
Judge David Davis of Illinois, Lincoln's manager, was busy 
winning delegates from Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, prom- 
ising cabinet positions without the sanction of Lincoln, and 
even against his direct instructions to make no pledges or 
promises. On the third ballot Lincoln's vote reached 231^, 
only short of the majority necessary for a choice ; and when 
Cartter of. Ohio announced the transfer of four votes from 
Chase to Lincoln, the nomination was made unanimous. Pande- 
monium reigned in the Wigwam and outside. Men hugged one 
another and wept for joy. The streets were filled with proces- 
sions of hilarious men shouting themselves hoarse for Honest 
Abe." Seward's chagrin was deep. ^'I am a leader," he wrote 
to his wife, ^Meposed ... in the hour of organization for de- 
cisive battle." But in spite of his disappointment he ralHed 
nobly to Lincoln's support. 

The platform denied ^Hhe authority of Congress, of a ter- 
ritorial legislature, or of an individual to give legal existence 
to slavery in any territory of the United States,"^ called for the 

^This was a repudiation of the Dred Scott decision, and a departure as 
radical as the South's — but in a diametrically opposite direction — from the 
principles of 1820 and 1850, when Congress, with the support of the North, had 
sanctioned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory south of 36° 30' and in 
the Mexican cession. 



522 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



definitive suppression of the African slave trade, the admission 
of Kansas as a free state, the construction of a Pacific railroad, 
the passage of a homestead bill, the appropriation of national 
aid for river and harbor improvements, and the enactment of 
a protective tariff to encourage home manufactures. For all 
this variety of recommendation, the campaign was waged on 
a single issue. The question referred to the voters was. Is 
slavery right and to be extended, or is it wrong and to be 
checked? Yancey and Lincoln agreed in the statement of 
the dilemma. 

When the state elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana went 
Republican in October, Lincoln's success seemed assured. Doug- 
las, on hearing of the results, immediately started South to 
labor for the preservation of the Union. He spoke to large 
audiences in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, 
and Virginia. To the question whether Lincoln's elebtion would 
justify secession he returned an emphatic No ! to the question 
whether the president would be justified in using force to pre- 
serve the Union he returned an equally emphatic Yes! He 
would ^^put the hemp around the neck of the first man who 
raised the arm of resistance to the constituted authorities of 
the country." But Douglas's action, however complimentary 
to his patriotism and courage, had as little effect on the rising 
tide of disunion as did King Canute's command to the waves. 
The legislature of South Carolina, which had convened on 
November 5 to cast the electoral vote of the state, decided, on 
the advice of Governor Gist, to remain in session until the re- 
sults of the election should be known ^ and to prepare the state 
for any emergency ^4n view of the probability of the election 
of a sectional candidate by a party . . . hostile to our institu- 
tions and fatally bent upon our ruin." How Lincoln carried 
the election of November 6 will appear from a study of the 
map following page 519. The student should note the following 
facts :^ (i) Lincoln's popular vote was but 40 per cent of the 

1 South Carolina was the only state that still retained, in i860, the early 
method of choosing the presidential electors by its legislature. This custom was 
abolished after the war. 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 523 



whole; (2) Douglas, though he carried only one state and part 
of another, rolled up immense minorities in all the states of 
the North; (3) Breckinridge, the disunionist candidate, re- 
ceived but 44.7 per cent of the vote of the Southern states. 
The Democrats secured control of both Houses of Congress by 
rather narrow majorities (8 in the Senate and 21 in the House). 

These figures could not be interpreted as a mandate from 
the Southern people to dissolve the Union, yet South Carolina 
proceeded immediately to the work. Four days after Lincoln's 
election her legislature called for a convention of the state to 
meet on December 17 at Charleston. On the twentieth this 
convention, by a unanimous vote of its 169 members, passed 
the famous Ordinance of Secession, declaring that the act of the 
convention of May 23, 1788, ^Vhereby the Constitution of 
the United States was ratified . . . [is] hereby repealed, and 
the union now subsisting between South Carolina and the other 
states under the name of the United States of America, is hereby 
dissolved." On the same evening, in a ceremony of high re- 
joicing attended by the officials of the state and distinguished by 
all the beauty and chivalry of the capital city of the South, the 
delegates set their names to the fateful ordinance.^ Following 
the example of the men of 1776, whom they believed they were 
imitating, the South Carolinians published a list of grievances 
with their ^^Declaration of Independence." If anyone is tempted 
by the postbellum interpretations of Alexander H. Stephens, 
Jefferson Davis, and others to believe that it was for the vindi- 
cation of the theoretical doctrine of states' rights or the threat- 
ened privilege of self-government that the South seceded, he 
should read this manifesto of the convention of South Carolina. 
Every grievance mentioned in it is directed against the antislav- 
ery propaganda: the Personal-Liberty Acts, the formation of 
abolitionist societies, the condemnation of slaveholding as sinful, 
the encouragement to fugitive slaves, the recognition of negroes 
as citizens, the election of a president who declared that the 

iThe ceremony took place in Institute Hall, the same room where, eight 
months before, the Southern delegates, led by Yancey, had marched out of the 
Democratic convention. The first scene was the prelude to the second. 



524 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



nation could not endure half slave and half free. "All hope of 
remedy is rendered vain," it concluded, "by the fact that the 
public opinion at the North has invested a great political error 
with the sanction of a more erroneous religious belief."^ 

Meanwhile the timid, vacillating Buchanan was floundering 
in a sea of indecision. The situation which confronted him 
when Congress met on the third of December was one of grave 
peril. Major Robert Anderson, with a garrison of only 64 men 
and with insufficient supplies of food and munitions, was sta- 
tioned at Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor, exposed to the 
attack of a hostile and rapidly arming community. No man 
doubted that the convention about to meet in a fortnight would 
declare the secession of South Carolina from the Union. The 
President's plain duty by his oath of office was to defend the 
authority of the United States. He should immediately and at 
any cost have sent food and reenforcements to Anderson and, 
declared in unequivocal terms, like Jackson's in 1832, his de- 
termination to collect the revenues and enforce the laws in 
every part of the Union. He had in his hands an able paper 
written by his Attorney-General, Jeremiah S. Black, defining 
his legal competency in these measures. But Buchanan, while 
feebly wishing to do his duty, was surrounded by counselors 
who boasted of "tying his hands." Three of the members of 
his cabinet (Cobb, Floyd, and Thompson) were secessionists 
at heart. Trescot of South Carolina, the Assistant Secretary 
of State, was assuming to direct negotiations between the Presi- 

iJt is true that R. B. Rhett of South Carolina on the same day published 
an address to the people of the slaveholding states in which he emphasized the 
tariff as the South's grievance. But this plea was disingenuous. Every member 
of the South Carolina delegation in the House had voted for the tariff bill of 
1857, which was in fact the lowest in our history. Rhett himself confessed that the 
complaint relative to the tariff would be a better cause for secession to present 
to the European nations than a protest against the Personal-Liberty Acts. How 
well his clever ruse succeeded is shown by the fact that when W. E. Forster 
said in the House of Commons, in 1862, that he presumed there was no question 
that slavery was the cause of the war, he was interrupted with cries of "No, no, 
the tariff ! " As a matter of fact, the provisional Confederate government at 
Montgomery continued the tariff of 1857 in force. 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 525 



dent and Governor Gist of South Carolina. The advice of 
Winfield Scott^ the general of the army, and the plea of Ander- 
son from Fort Moultrie for a policy of reenforcement were 
ignored. Buchanan sent a ^'Constitutional essay" to Congress 
on December 4^ instead of a ringing declaration of purpose. 
The upshot of the pitiable message was, in the witty comment 
of Seward, that ^4t is the duty of the President to execute the 
laws — unless somebody opposes him; and that no state has a 
right to go out of the Union — unless it wants to." Buchanan 
declared that the states must obey the laws of the Union — and 
added that he had no power to coerce them to do so. When 
the representatives from South Carolina in the House visited 
him a few days later, he promised them that he would not 
disturb the status quo in the forts in Charleston harbor so long 
as they were not attacked. Under this 'Hruce," inaction con- 
tinued week after week at Washington, while disunion sentiment 
at the South gained strength.^ 

During this critical month of December, Congress, to whose 
shoulders Buchanan would willingly have shifted the responsi- 
, bility of the executive, was busy with plans for the reconciliation 
of the sections. An able committee of thirteen was appointed 
in the Senate, including Davis, Douglas, Wade, and Seward. 
The venerable J. J. Crittenden of Kentucky, the successor of 
Henry Clay, presented a scheme of compromise consisting of 
six unamendable amendments to the Constitution and four 
resolutions. The proposed amendments, besides protecting 
slavery in the states where it was legal, sanctioning the domestic 
slave trade, and guaranteeing payment by the United States 
government for escaped slaves, revived the 36° 30' line of the 
Missouri Compromise and forbade the interference by Congress 

^It would be hard to overrate the encouragement given to secession in other 
states than South Carolina by Buchanan's pusillanimous course. We have seen 
by the election figures that there was a considerable amount of Unionist senti- 
ment in the South in November. By the end of the year it had practically dis- 
appeared. Yancey, in urging his state of Alabama to secede, could say: "I 
believe that there will not be power to direct a gun against a sovereign state. 
Certainly there will be no will to do so during the present administration." 



526 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



with slavery south of that line. The resolutions called for the 
faithful execution of the Fugitive-Slave Law, the repeal of the 
Personal-Liberty Acts, and the enforcement of the laws against 
the African slave trade. The committee met on December 21, 
the day that the news of the secession of South Carolina reached 
Washington. Throughout the North there was a lively hope 
that the Crittenden Compromise might be adopted, especially 
in the financial and commercial circles, where there was much 
anxiety for the safety of large sums of money invested in the 
South. It is fairly certain that if a popular referendum had been 
taken on the Compromise it would have been adopted. But the 
committee could not agree. Davis voted with Seward against 
the restoration of the 36^ 30' line. The Republican members, 
supported by Lincoln, who wrote ^'Entertain no proposition 
for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery," voted 
steadily in the negative. Their furthest concession was that 
slavery should not be disturbed in the slave states. On Decem- 
ber 31 the committee reported that it had not been able to agree 
on any general plan of adjustment. A committee of thirty-three 
in the House met with no better success. Its only fruit was the 
recommendation of a constitutional amendment making slavery 
inviolable in the states where it was established by law. The 
amendment passed both Houses by the necessary two-thirds 
vote, but only two states took pains to ratify it. 

Major Anderson, exercising the discretion given to him by 
verbal orders from the War Office, had spiked the guns of Fort 
jMoultrie on the day after Christmas and moved his little garri- 
son to the safer walls of Fort Sumter. The South Carolinians 
regarded this act as a breach of Buchanan's pledge not to dis- 
turb the situation in Charleston harbor, and three commis- 
sioners from the ^'sovereign state," who were in Washington to 
treat with the L'nited States government ^'for the apportionment 
of the public debt and the possession of the forts and other 
property of the United States within the state," called on the 
President in peremptory terms to order the return of Anderson 
to Fort -Moultrie. The bewildered Buchanan seemed about to 
yield to their demand when the Unionists of his cabinet, led by 



THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 527 



Secretary of State Black/ virtually took control of affairs and 
compelled the President to uphold Anderson. ^'I cannot and I 
will not" was the new language in which he replied to the re- 
quest of South Carolina that he withdraw the troops from 
Charleston harbor. It gave the North cause for rejoicing at 
the beginning of the new year. 

Buchanan's supineness and the failure of Congress to reach 
any agreement gave strength to the secession movement, which 
moved rapidly with the opening of the new year. Between 
January i and February i, 1861, conventions in the states of 
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, 
in the order named, passed ordinances of secession, generally 
by large majorities. Only in Alabama and Georgia was there 
a decided opposition to overcome, led in the latter state by 
Alexander H. Stephens, who had ^^not lost hopes of securing 
[our] rights in the Union," and was opposed to secession "as 
a remedy for anticipated aggression on the part of the Federal 
Executive or Congress."^ Texas was the only state in which 
the convention submitted the secession ordinance to the people 
for a referendum; and the figures of the popular vote (37,794 
to 11,235), contrasted with the vote in the convention (166 to 
7) and with the large popular vote cast for the Unionist candi- 
dates Bell and Douglas in the November election, tempt one to 
speculate on the truth of the frequent statement that the people 
of the South were far ahead of their leaders in the desire for 
independence.^ 

^Cass had resigned on December 15, and Black had been moved up to his 
place. Edwin M. Stanton had succeeded to the Attorney-Generalship. Cobb 
had left his department of the Treasury December 8. Floyd had been forced to 
resign on account of crooked financial dealings, on December 29. Thompson 
remained in the cabinet until January 7. 

2 Stephens might well speak so, for he had a letter from his friend President- 
elect Lincoln, written December 23, i860, assuring him that the Southern states 
need have no fear that the incoming administration would disturb slavery within 
their limits. Stephens should have made the letter public. 

^Rhodes (Vol, III, pp. 276-279) collects a number of citations to show that 
the politicians of the South were far behind the people in secessionist sentiment. 
So many instances can be cited on both sides of such a question, however, that it 
is impossible to be sure of one's conclusions. Rhodes feels "an additional con- 



528 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The adoption of the Crittenden Compromise by Congress or 
of a Jacksonian poHcy in the White House ^ might have halted 
secession at the borders of South CaroHna, though it is doubt- 
ful whether more than a brief postponement of the ultimate ap- 
peal to arms could have been accomplished. The difference 
between the sections was beyond any device of constitutional 
machinery to compose. There could be no enduring peace in our 
land until slavery was banished. Lincoln was right about "the 
house divided." Two civilizations confronted each other across 
Mason and Dixon's line, each convinced that it stood for the wel- 
fare of man and enjoyed the blessing of God ; each convinced 
that the other was aggressive, faithless, and accursed. They no 
longer understood each other's language. Words like "honor," 
"right," "freedom," "citizen," meant different things to each 
section. The South asked the North to call an institution right 
which the North believed to be wrong. The North seemed to 
cast a stigma on the highest society of the South by regarding 
slavery as a blot on civilization and the slaveholder as a delib- 
erate sinner. The South accused the North of being sectional 
and at the same time demanded that it should mind its own busi- 
ness and cease to "meddle" with an institution which the North 
looked on as a national disgrace. Inconsistency, misunder- 
standing, and passion ruled. "It would not be enough to please 
the Southern states," wrote James Russell Lowell in the Atlantic 
Monthly of January, 1861, "that we should stop asking them 
to abolish slavery; what they demand of us is nothing less 
than that we should abolish the spirit of the age." 

fidence" in his statements "for the reason that the careful historians Von Hoist 
and Schouler have come to the same conclusion" (p. 279, note). But these are 
just the two historians who would emphasize most the testimony to Southern 
disunionism. 

1 General Scott quotes from Southern papers the admission that there would 
have been no Southern Confederacy if his advice to strengthen the forts had 
been followed (Memoirs, p. 6i6). But the opinion of a few Southern editors 
was neither infallible nor representative. 



CHAPTER X 



THE CIVIL WAR 

And when the step of Earthauake shook the house, 

Wrenching the rafters from their ancient hold, 

He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again 

The rafters of the home. Edwin Marzham 

The Resort to Arms 

In spite of the critical situation in Charleston harbor and the 
perplexity of the administration at Washington ; in spite of the 
failure of the congressional committees to agree on a plan of 
conciliation ; in spite of the rapid secession of the cotton states 
in January and the formation of a Southern Confederacy at 
Montgomery, Alabama, on the fourth of February, 1861; in 
spite of the fact that the Star of the West, a merchant vessel 
carrying provisions from New York to Fort Sumter and flying 
the American flag at her masthead, had been fired upon and 
turned back by the batteries of Charleston harbor, — the great 
majority of the citizens of both sections refused to believe that 
the gates of the temple of Janus were really to be thrown open. 

War was a horrid thought. The country was prosperous, and 
a hundred projects of industrial enterprise and social reform 
were stirring in the American mind. However severe the tempo- 
rary setback of the panic of 1857, there was no effect of it visible 
in i860. Our population during the decade had increased from 
23,191,876 to 31,443,322— a gain of 35.59 per cent. The in- 
crease in the city population was 78.62 percent. The farm, to be 
sure, still maintained its lead over the factory in i860, when our 
agricultural products were valued at $1,913,000,000 (as much 
as farm products and manufactures combined in 1850), with 
manufactures running a very close second at $1,885,862,000. 
The output of woolen goods had jumped from $48,600,000 to 

529 



530 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

$73,400,000 and of cotton from $65,500,000 to $115,600,000 in 
the ten years. In 1850 iron rails to the value of $25,000 were 
manufactured; in i860 this had increased to $105,000. The 
tonnage on the Great Lakes had grown from 215,787 to 
611,398; the railroad mileage, from 9021 to 30,635. There 
were 50,000 miles of telegraph wires and 186,000 miles of post- 
roads. Over 2,500,000 immigrants had come to America dur- 
ing the decade. The 6 per cent government securities were 
selling at a premium of 17 points. In the summer of 1858 a 
cable had been laid on the bed of the Atlantic from Newfound- 
land to the British Isles, and a message of greeting had been 
exchanged between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan. 
The same year the ^^pony express" carried mail from the 
Missouri River to the Pacific coast in ten days, arousing re- 
newed interest in a transcontinental railroad. Conventions were 
meeting to discuss women's rights, prison reform, temperance, 
free religion, and a host of other" topics. The intellectual fer- 
ment out of which these various movements came was stimu- 
lated by a rich literature of idealism from Emerson, Lowell, 
Holmes, Whittier, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Curtis, Simms — the 
great essayists, historians, and poets whose names are the glory 
of American letters. 

The people of the North and the border slave states were 
loath to accept the deadlock in the committees of conciliation. 
Petitions poured in upon Congress for the reconsideration of 
the Crittenden amendments. Public men in high station and 
influential newspapers declared their belief that an overwhelm- 
ing majority of the country was in favor of their adoption. Let 
them be submitted to a plebiscite. The people with a mighty 
voice would decree peace where the legislators had failed. On 
the same day that the delegates from the seceding states met at 
Montgomery to form a Southern Confederacy, a peace conven- 
tion was opened at Washington with the venerable ex-President 
Tyler in the chair. Over 150 delegates, representing 21 of the 
33 states of the Union, labored for a month, with diminishing 
harmony, to devise an acceptable plan of compromise — ^^a 
Convention of Notables," as Lowell sneeringly called it, ''to 



THE CIVIL WAR 



531 



thresh the straw of debate anew — the usual panacea of pala- 
ver." In the morning of March 4, a few hours before the end 
of the Thirty-sixth Congress, the proposals of the convention 
(not differing essentially from the Crittenden Compromise) 
were submitted to the Senate and received seven affirmative 
votes. The convention, like the committees, went its way ^Ho 
a place in the great company of historic futilities." The only 
mouse that this mountain of conciliatory labor brought forth 
was a proposed thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, 
forbidding Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in any 
state where it was established by law. 

Material motives were mixed with nobler anxieties for peace. 
It was estimated that $200,000,000 were owed by the Southern 
planters to Northern merchants and bankers. There was a 
movement of indignant irritability in financial and business 
circles that this persistent specter of slavery should rise like 
Banquo's ghost to cast its chilling presence over the scene. To 
use Benton's simile of thirty years before, it was like the 
Egyptian plague of frogs, infesting every nook and corner of our 
life. Robert C. Winthrop, a prominent ^'cotton Whig" of Mas- 
sachusetts, expressed the sentiment of his class in the North 
when he deplored ^Hhe intemperate antislavery agitation" as 
"the source of a very large part of the troubles with which the 
country had been disturbed." 

The determination of the aristocratic mercantile interests in 
the cities of the East not to let slavery interfere with business 
is strikingly illustrated by the case of New York. The South- 
ern press besought the city not to sacrifice her commerce, 
her wealth, her population, her character," by warring on her 
"Southern friends and best customers ... at the bidding of 
Black Republican tyrants." When a newspaper editor from 
Georgia visited New York to make up the list of merchants 
whom the South should boycott or patronize according to their 
sympathies with slavery, he was flatteringly received by scores 
of prominent business men "who sought a place on the white 
list." Fernando Wood, the mayor, suggested in his message 
of January 7 that if disunion came, the city should declare 



532 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



its independence and preserve its trade. According to John 
Forsythe of Alabama, one of the three commissioners whom the 
new Confederate government at Montgomery had sent North 
to treat" with the United States, ^'200 of the most wealthy and 
influential citizens of New York had been approached, and were 
then arranging the details of a plan to throw off the authority 
of the Federal and State governments, to seize the navy yard at 
Brooklyn, the vessels of war, and the forts in the harbor, and to 
declare New York a ^free city.'" Russell of the London Times, 
visiting New York and dining with Seymour, Tilden^ and Ban- 
croft, said that their conversation and arguments left on his 
mind the impression ^'that according to the Constitution the 
government could not use force to prevent secession or to com- 
pel states which had seceded by the will of their people to 
acknowledge the Federal power." ^ 

The pacifism of the idealist, the merchant, and the constitu- 
tionalist was reenforced by the views of the men who thought 
that the South was not worth fighting for and that a Union held 
together by force was not worth living in. The Garrisonian 
abolitionists were quite willing to let the South go. The Union 
that was left would be freed from a great curse and exoner- 
ated from complicity in disgraceful legislation Hke the Fugitive 
Slave laws and humiliating pronouncements like the Dred Scott 
decision.^ At least up to the close of i860 men of enormous in- 
fluence spread abroad the doctrine of acquiescence in peaceable 
secession, which their later conversion to the policy of coercion 
could not wholly undo. Winfield Scott, general of the army, 
was for letting ^Hhe wayward sisters depart in peace." Henry 
Ward Beecher said, in a speech in Brooklyn on November 27, 

^New York City had gone against Lincoln in the election by over 30,000, 
although he had carried the other great cities of the country (Philadelphia, Chi- 
cago, Boston, and even St. Louis). 

2 The horror of war formed the subject of Wendell Phillips's most dramatic 
orations. Whittier, the Quaker poet, sang : 

" They break the links of Union : shall we light 
The flames of Hell to weld anew the chain 
On that red anvil where each blow is pain ? " 



THE CIVIL WAR 



533 



"In so far as the free states are concerned, I hold that it will be 
an advantage for the South to go off." Horace Greeley's edi- 
torials in the November issues of the New York Tribune in- 
sisted that no attempt must be made to prevent secession. ^^If 
the cotton states shall decide that they can do better out of the 
Union than in it, we shall insist on letting them go in peace. 
We hope never to live in a repubhc where one section is pinned 
to the residue by bayonets." ^'Five millions of people, of whom 
at least a half a miUion are able and willing to shoulder muskets, 
can never be subdued while fighting around and over their own 
hearthstones." This was the language of the Charleston Mer- 
cury and the Richmond Enquirer \ Two days before South 
Carolina seceded an article in the Tribune spoke of ^Hhe idle 
gabble and monstrous gassing about revolution and civil war." 

It is little wonder, with irresolution in the executive, dead- 
lock in Congress, and confusion of counsel among the leaders 
of public opinion in the North, that the Southerners, with few 
exceptions, should have believed that they would be allowed 
peaceably to withdraw from the Union. Jefferson Davis, who 
was one of the first to warn the Confederacy that it must expect 
a long and bloody war, could say as late as January 21, 1861, 
on taking pathetic leave of his colleagues in the Senate, that 
he hoped that ^'peaceful relations might continue" between the 
two sections. The South knew the North as little as the North 
knew the South. Impassioned public speakers and editors of 
an extremely vituperative press had encouraged the belief that 
a great proportion of the Yankees were fanatical abolitionists 
filled with hatred for the South, hypocritical money-grabbers, 
and Pharisaical meddlers, too cowardly to provoke a combat. 
In 1850 the North had been for a compromise which allowed 
slavery to extend into the territories of the United States. But 
the events of the decade, as they passed in rapid succession, — the 
Fugitive-Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the Lecompton 
fraud, the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, 
the John Brown raid, — had nurtured a grim conviction among 
the plain people, not fully sensed by the leaders on either side, 
that the test between slavery and freedom must come soon. 



534 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The surprised indignation of the South, when their determi- 
nation to compel secession by the forcible seizure of Fort Sumter 
had crystallized Northern sentiment into a practically unani- 
mous resolve to maintain the Union by arms, is well illustrated 
by a letter from Mrs. R. L. Hunt of New Orleans to her brother 
Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln's cabi- 
net: ^'Do not delude yourself or others with the notion that 
war can maintain the Union. Alas, I say it with a heavy heart, 
the Union is destroyed; it can never be restored. If, indeed, 
the Federal Government had frowned on the first dawning of 
disunion, things might have been different. But the United 
States suffered South Carolina to secede without opposition, 
and with scarcely a murmur of disapprobation. ... All the 
Southern states, with the exception of Kentucky, Missouri, and 
Maryland, have joined the secession, and have formed them- 
selves into a powerful Confederacy, with a government pos- 
sessing all the usual powers of sovereignties, exercising entire 
and exclusive sway, legislative, executive, and judicial, within 
the limits of those states and dissolving all connection with the 
United States. Having thus by a revolution almost bloodless 
assumed and exercised the right of self-government, the Con- 
federate States are now threatened with war and desolation if 
they do not abjure the government they have formed. . . . The 
time has passed for a discussion about the territories and fu- 
gitive slaves and the constitutional right of a state to secede. 
. . . Secession is un fait accompli. Disunion is a fixed fact. 
It is worse than useless to deny or attempt to evade this truth. 
. . . And how do the statesmen of the North, how do you, my 
dear brother, who should recognize facts as they are, propose 
to deal with this question ? With sword and buckler, the rifle, 
the bayonet, . . . and all the dread instruments of war . . . ? 
With these you propose to subjugate the entire free people of 
the South, while you mock them with the declaration that your 
object is to maintain a Union which no longer exists. . . . You 
may for the moment have an advantage in wealth and numbers. 
But . . . the North is fighting for subjugation and domination, 
the South for liberty and independence. It is precisely Hke the 



THE CIVIL WAR 



535 



great Revolutionary struggle of 76 against the tyranny of 
Great Britain. . . . How can you expect victory in such a 
cause ? . . . Surely eight millions of people, armed in the holy 
cause of liberty, . . . are invincible by any force the North can 
send against them. . . . Never were a people more united and 
more determined." 

The government which Mrs. Hunt, with a rather premature 
optimism, speaks of as exercising entire and exclusive sway" 
in the Confederate states was organized at Montgomery, Feb- 
ruary 4, 1 861. It adopted a constitution patterned closely on 
that of the United States, but characteristically substituted 
the phrase ^^We, the deputies of the Sovereign and Independent 
States" for ''We, the people of the United States." Although 
itself the result of the secession of sovereign states," it de- 
clared the new Confederacy permanent." It prohibited pro- 
tective duties and the expenditure of public money for internal 
improvements. It guaranteed the recognition and protection 
of slavery in any new territory which the Confederacy might 
acquire, but, out of deference to the opinion of the civilized 
world, it forbade the African slave trade. It provided for a 
single term of six years for the president and gave him the 
power to veto separate items in appropriation bills. The mem- 
bers of the cabinet were recognized on the floor of Congress. 
Immediately after the constitution was framed, the provisional 
Congress^ chose Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as president 
and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia as vice president. They 
made provision for war by authorizing a military force of 
100,000 volunteers to serve a year and a loan of $15,000,000 in 
8 per cent bonds, levying an export tax of one eighth of a 

iThe convention which made the constitution acted as a provisional Con- 
gress for about a year. The first regularly elected Congress of the Confederacy 
met on February i8, 1862. The constitution had been ratified in the spring of 
1861 by conventions in the seven seceding states, the total vote being 862 to 42. 
Exactly half the negative votes came from South Carolina, where the exponents 
of the extreme states'-rights doctrine protested against the features of " Southern 
nationalism" in the constitution. This vote was the harbinger of a struggle be- 
tween the old Southern states of the Atlantic seaboard and the "consolidated" 
Confederate government which lasted all through the life of the Confederacy. 



536 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



cent a pound on cotton to pay the interest on the loan. They 
turned over to the president the responsibility for getting pos- 
session of Forts Sumter and Pickens. They appointed three 
commissioners to Europe to seek recognition and alliances, and 
three to Washington to treat with their ''late confederates of the 
United States" in relation to the public property and the 
public debts. 

iMeanwhile Abraham Lincoln was quietly but anxiously 
watching the progress of secession from his home in Springfield, 
Illinois. The awkward arrangement of our political system 
which allows four months to intervene between the election and 
the inauguration of a president has never had more unfortunate 
results.^ While the Southern politicians were boasting of tying 
Buchanan's hands at Washington, Lincoln's hands were tied 
at Springfield. He was still technically only a private citizen, 
an Illinois lawyer. He could and did write to individuals, like 
Gilmer of North Carolina fwhom he afterwards invited to fill 
a cabinet position) and Stephens of Georgia (who had been his 
colleague in the House in 1847), that he had no intention of 
withholding official patronage from slaveholders, that he ''would 
be glad to see any laws of the states repealed which were in 
conflict with the national Fugitive-Slave Act of 1850," and that 
his administration would not interfere directly or indirectly 
with slavery in the states where it was established by law. 
^'The South will be in no more danger in this respect," he wrote 
Stephens, "than it was in the days of Washington." But, after 
all, these were only private letters, which did nothing to allay 
Southern apprehensions ; and Stephens did not see fit to make 
the correspondence pubHc. In one matter only did Lincoln 
interfere during these four months to influence the counsels in 
Washington. On the very day of the secession of South Caro- 

^Of course, in the original intent of the Constitution the delay was for the 
purpose of allowing the electors chosen in Xovember to meet and select a presi- 
dent. But that procedure had ceased, almost at the beginning of our national 
government, to be anything but a mere formality. Even today the awkward de- 
lay is virtually equivalent to an interregnum," which condemns the last session 
of the Congress of the outgoing administration to the futility of marking time. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



537 



lina, Thurlow Weed called on Lincoln in Springfield, as Senator 
Seward's representative, to seek the opinion of the President- 
elect on the proposed plan for the revival and extension of the 
Missouri Compromise line. Lincoln's answer was unequivocal. 
Slavery must not be tolerated in any of the territory of the 
United States. On that issue he was inexorable. Seward ac- 
cepted the ultimatum, and the Crittenden Compromise was 
defeated. 

Lincoln has been severely criticized for this fateful decision. 
The advocates of the Compromise have pointed out that the 
election of i860 was by no means a mandate" to carry out 
the Chicago platform. For, although Lincoln's electoral major- 
ity was large, the popular vote of the country, by a margin of 
more than a million, had been cast for other candidates — who 
favored compromise. It was therefore^ say these writers, a 
selfish, narrow preference for the maintenance of their party 
to the maintenance of the Union that actuated Lincoln and his 
followers. This is a grave indictment, if true. Its validity 
lies, of course, in the question of whether the Crittenden Com- 
promise, if adopted, would have preserved the Union. Would 
the determined South rest content with the barren victory 
which secured to it only territories from which slavery was 
excluded by ^'the laws of nature"?^ Would the determined 
North, even if the Republican party should commit suicide, 
acquiesce in the very conditions which had called the Repub- 
lican party into existence? Unless these questions can be 
answered in the affirmative, Lincoln was right when he wrote 
to Congressman Kellogg^ "The tug has to come, and better 

^Lincoln wrote to Weed (December 17, 1861), "A year will not pass till we 
shall have to take Cuba as a condition on which they will stay in the Union." 
He may have been mistaken ; yet Senator Brown of Mississippi had said in i860: 
"I want Cuba; I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican states; 
and I want them all for the same reason, — for the planting and spread of slavery. 
... I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our divine 
Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth. ... I would make the refusal to 
acquire territory because it was to be slave territory, a cause of disunion, just 
as I would make the refusal to admit a new state, because it was to be a slave 
state, a cause for disunion." 



538 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



now than later." The only compromise" that either side 
would accept in 1861 was one which appealed to the other side 
as an abject surrender — a compromise of principles. 

Mr. Rhodes thinks that the South should have accepted the 
terms which Lincoln approved and which Seward offered in 
the Senate committee with the consensus of all the Republican 
members ; namely, ( i ) an amendment to the Constitution for- 
bidding Congress to interfere with slavery in the states, (2) a 
jury trial for fugitive slaves, and (3) the recommendation of 
Congress to the Northern states to repeal their Personal Liberty 
laws. ^^Considering that the slavery question had been sub- 
mitted to the people at the presidential election, and that the 
antislavery party had won, was it not a fair offer? Did not 
the Republicans meet the cotton states half way? Should not 
Davis, Toombs, and Hunter have agreed to the proposition? 
Could they not have done so without dishonor ? As players in 
the political game, fault cannot be found with the Southerners 
for making extreme demands, but when they had ascertained 
the furthest concession the Republicans were willing to make, 
ought they not to have accepted it rather than run the risk of 
involving the country in civil war?"^ But it is not difficult to 
see why the Southerners would not accept Seward's proposi- 
tion. For them a purely sectional party had got control of 
the government, — a party whose members, in spite of the dis- 
avowal in its platform, had condoned the behavior of John Brown, 
— a party whose leader had predicted that the country would 
become all slave or all free. With Abraham Lincoln in office, 
dispensing the vast amount of federal patronage, controlling 
national policies and diplomatic negotiations, commanding the 
army and navy of the United States, there was little chance that 
the first clause of the alternative prophecy would come true. 

^Rhodes, Vol. Ill, p. 177. Yet a few pages before (Vol. Ill, p. 149, note) , com- 
paring the language of a speech of Jefferson Davis's in the Senate, December 10, 

1860, with that of James Russell Lowell in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 

1 86 1, Rhodes shows how impossible compromise was, "These two quotations 
show," he says, "as clearly as anything I know, the underlying reasons of the 
war between the North and the South." 



THE CIVIL WAR 



539 



It is easy to discover inconsistency, irritability, and misrep- 
resentation in the Southern position. The Southerners insisted 
that they alone must make the terms on which they would re- 
main in the Union. They reproached the North for being ^^sec- 
tional'' and at the same time told it to mind its own business, 
their real grievance, of course, being that the North was ^'na- 
tional" enough to feel a responsibility for the condition of the 
South. They resented the bitter attacks of a comparatively few 
abolitionist papers on their character as slaveholders, while 
their own press, almost without exception, indulged in the wild- 
est language of vituperation against the Yankees." Yancey 
and Breckinridge might travel freely in the North, presenting 
the Southern cause to audiences in New York City, but a 
Northerner, suspected of being tinged with abolitionist prin- 
ciples, was promptly persuaded to leave a Southern town. 
Calhoun demanded that there should be no discussion of slavery 
in the North, but he insisted upon slavery's taking precedence 
of every other question in the South. For this he would muzzle 
the press, search the mails, make the laws of the states overbear 
the federal statutes, and reduce the federal government to a 
nullity which could end only in disintegration. Finally, though 
they asserted that slavery was sanctioned by God,^ they had no 
confidence in its divine protection. For they would tolerate no 
argument on the subject, ignoring the dictum of Macaulay that 
"men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when 
they discuss it freely."^ But over against all this indictment 

^In a Thanksgiving sermon at New Orleans the Reverend B. M. Palmer said: 
"In this great struggle we defend the cause of God and religion. It is our solemn 
duty to ourselves, to our slaves, to the world, and to Almighty God to preserve 
and transmit our existing system of domestic servitude with the right, unchal- 
lenged by man, to go and root itself wherever Providence and nature may carry it." 

2 Frederick Law Olmsted, in his dispassionate survey of conditions in the 
South, tells of asking a man in official position in Richmond whether he knew 
anything about the reliability of certain figures in Professor Johnson's "Agri- 
cultural Tour," on the value of slaves exported from Virginia, and receiving the 
reply: "No, I don't know anything about it. But if they are anything unfavor- 
able to the institution of slavery, you may be sure that they are wrong" 
("Journey in the Seaboard Slave States," Vol. I, p. 6i). 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



must be set the tremendous fact that the South was contending 
for the preservation of $4,000,000,000 of slave property, for 
the world's export market in cotton, and for a social system 
which it believed absolutely necessary for the maintenance of 
the civilization, the purity^ and the safety of the white race.^ 

Lincoln took touching leave of his neighbors in Springfield 
on February 11, 1861. His journey to Washington, marked by 
very disappointing speeches in various cities along the route, 
was uneventful except for rumors of assassination which reached 
him at Philadelphia and persuaded him to avoid passing through 
the secessionist city of Baltimore by day, as he had planned. 
He reached the capital safely on the twenty-third, and nine days 
later delivered his Inaugural Address to an audience not wholly 
free from apprehension.^ In his first public utterance as the 
new head of the nation Lincoln pledged his administration to 
the faithful execution of the Fugitive-Slave Law and the non- 
interference with slavery in the Southern states. There would 
be no bloodshed or violence unless it should be forced on the 
national government. ^^In your hands, my dissatisfied country- 
men, and not in mine," he said to the South, ^^is the momentous 
issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You 
can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. 
You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the govern- 
ment, while I shall have the most solemn one to ^preserve, pro- 
tect, and defend it.'" Yet Lincoln at the same time declared 

^Robert Toombs put the case clearly when he said, "The question is not 
whether we could be more prosperous and happy with these 3,500,000 slaves 
in Africa and their places filled with an equal number of hardy, intelligent, and 
enterprising citizens of the superior race ; but it is simply whether, while we 
have them among us, we would be most prosperous with them in freedom or 
bondage." To that question there was but one answer in the South. 

2 All through the winter there were rumors that an attempt would be made to 
prevent the inauguration of a Black Republican president. On Christmas Day, 
i860, the Richmond Enquirer asked, " Can there not be found men bold and 
brave enough in Marjdand to unite with the Virginians in seizing the Capitol at 
Washington?" General Scott had about 450 soldiers of the regular army in 
Washington to insure the peaceable counting of the electoral vote on February 13, 
and the force was increased to 650 for the inauguration. Both events passed in 
perfect quiet. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



541 



that no state could lawfully leave the Union "upon its own mere 
motion," that the ordinances of secession were void, that he 
should take care to execute the laws of the Union in all the 
states, as he was bound to do by his oath of office, and that he 
would use the power confided to him ^Ho hold, occupy, and 
possess the property and places belonging to the Government." 
The sinister import of these warnings could not be hidden by 
the beautiful sentiment of the closing sentence of the Inau- 
gural: ^^The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every 
battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth- 
stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the 
Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the 
better angels of our nature." The South, regarding secession 
and the Confederacy as accompHshed facts, interpreted the 
Inaugural as a virtual declaration of war.^ 

The next day the Senate in executive session ratified the 
President's choice of a cabinet.^ It was a composite body, 
representing all shades of Unionist sentiment. Four of its 
members had been Lincoln's rivals in the Chicago convention. 
Chase and Welles represented the anti-Nebraska Democracy; 
Cameron and Smith were rewarded for political services; 
Bates and Blair were from the loyal slaveholding states. The 
two tasks which the President saw immediately before him were 
to hold Forts Sumter and Pickens and to keep the border slave 
states in the Union. The day of the inauguration a report 
reached the War Office from Major Anderson that he had pro- 
visions for a month and that 20,000 men would be needed to 

group of secessionists at Washington wrote to L. P. Walker, the Con- 
federate Secretary of War, on the day of the Inaugural: "We agreed that it 
was Lincoln's purpose at once to attempt the collection of the revenue, to rein- 
force and hold Forts Sumter and Pickens, and to retake the other places. He 
is a man of will and firmness. His cabinet will yield to him with alacrity, . . . 
There are five or six ships in New York harbor all ready to start." 

2Namely : William H. Seward of New York (State) , Salmon P. Chase of Ohio 
(Treasury), Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania (War), — to be replaced early in 
1862 by Edwin M. Stanton of Ohio, — Edward Bates of Missouri (Attorney- 
General), Gideon Welles of Connecticut (Navy), Caleb Smith of Indiana (Inte- 
rior), and Montgomery Blair of Maryland (Postmaster-General). 



542 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



hold Fort Sumter. General Scott advised evacuation. ^'As a 
practical military question, the time for succoring Fort Sumter 
with any means at hand," he said, ^'had passed away." At a 
cabinet meeting on March 15 Seward, Cameron, Welles, Smith, 
and Bates all agreed that it was unwise to attempt to provision 
the fort. Seward's behavior was extraordinary. He seemed to 
regard himself as the guiding spirit of the administration, whose 
duty it was to lead the inexperienced Lincoln gently but firmly 
along the path to peace. He entered into negotiations with the 
Confederate ^^ambassadors" from Montgomery and gave them 
secret assurance that the status of Fort Sumter would not 
be disturbed. He declared with oracular optimism that the 
South would soon come back to its allegiance to the Union with 
a little careful handling : ^^The trouble will all blow over within 
ninety days." ^^He was vigilantly attentive," says Welles, ^Ho 
every measure and movement in the order departments; . . . 
watched and scrutinized every appointment that was made; 
. . . but was not communicative in regard to the transactions 
of the State Department." He tried to get Lincoln to omit the 
general cabinet meetings and consult with the secretaries sepa- 
rately as occasion arose. And finally, on April i, he submitted 
to Lincoln an amazing paper entitled Thoughts for the Presi- 
dent's Consideration." At the end of a month, he said, the 
administration still found itself without a policy domestic or 
foreign. This indecision must not continue. Let Sumter be 
evacuated to appease the South, and a vigorous foreign policy 
initiated to cement the Union. ^'I would demand explana- 
tions from France and Spain categorically and at once . . . 
and if satisfactory explanations were not received . . . would 
convene Congress and declare war against them. But what- 
ever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecu- 
tion of it. . . . Either the President must do it himself . . . 
or devolve it on some member of his cabinet. ... I neither 
seek to evade nor assume the responsibility." Lincoln, with 
great forbearance and kindness, set the importunate secre- 
tary right on the question as to who was the head of the 
administration. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



543 



The President had already (and now with the approval of all 
the cabinet except Seward and Smith) decided to send a relief 
expedition to Fort Sumter and fixed April 6 as the date of its 
departure. On that day a clerk in the State Department was 
sent to Charleston to present the following notification, written 
in Lincoln's own hand^ to Governor Pickens of South CaroHna : 
^^I am directed by the President of the United States to notify 
you to expect that an attempt will be made to supply Fort 
Sumter with provisions only; and that if such an attempt be 
not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition will 
be made without further notice." Meanwhile a lively exchange 
of telegrams had been going on between the Confederate govern- 
ment at Montgomery, its commissioners at Washington, Gov- 
ernor Pickens, and General Beauregard, in command of the 
Confederate troops at Charleston. Seeing in Lincoln's Inaugu- 
ral the doom of their hopes of peaceful secession, the Confed- 
erates sought to gain delay for better preparations. The secret 
instructions to the commissioners at Washington were to ^'play 
with Seward" and to delay and gain time until the South was 
ready." But Lincoln's warning to Governor Pickens precipi- 
tated action. The Northern papers referred to the Sumter re- 
lief expedition as ^'a force which will overcome all opposition." 
The commissioners believed that Seward had dehberately 
deceived them. Governor Pickens believed that Lincoln was 
hiding the purpose of armed coercion behind the pretext of pro- 
visioning the fort. So the cabinet at Montgomery, under the 
pressure of these representations^ and in spite of the remon- 
strances of the Secretary of State, Robert Toombs, who warned, 
^^It is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the 
North," instructed Beauregard to demand the surrender of 
the fort. 

Major Anderson refused to surrender. The pilots of Charles- 
ton harbor sent word to Beauregard that a United States vessel 
had been sighted. Another embassy was sent to Anderson at 
midnight, and on his second refusal to surrender he was formally 
notified at 3.20 a.m. (April 12) that the Confederate batteries 
would open fire on the fort in one hour. With the first roar 



544 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



of the guns the people of Charleston began to wake from their 
light sleep and flock to the esplanade which faced the harbor, 
where they watched the spectacular duel between the island 
batteries and the fort. The prudent stayed on shore, cheering 
the shots that struck and waving the Palmetto flag. The more 
venturesome put out into the harbor with little apparent regard 
for the range of the guns. All day the battle continued, and at 
intervals through the night of rain and wind that followed, the 
Confederate batteries kept up the fire. In the morning the duel 
was resumed. After maintaining the unequal contest for thirty- 
two hours, the fort in flames and his flag shot down, his ex- 
hausted men tortured with the heat and choked with smoke, 
Major Anderson surrendered on the afternoon of Saturday, 
April 13. On Sunday he marched out of the fort, after saluting 
the flag, with drums beating and colors flying, and embarked 
for New York on the Federal vessels lying outside the bar.^ 

The assault on Fort Sumter put an end to hesitancy and con- 
fused counsels. The day after Anderson's surrender Lincoln 
issued a proclamation declaring that the laws of the United 
States were obstructed in the seven states of the secession by 
"combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary 
course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the 
marshals of the law," and called upon the governors of the loyal 
states for 75,000 volunteers from their militia to serve for three 
months. None of the governors of the eight slave states which 
had not seceded obeyed the President's call, but the response 
from the country north of Mason and Dixon's line was instan- 
taneous and hearty. Party lines were obliterated. The mal- 
contents swung into line. "That first gun at Fort Sumter," 

iThe relief expedition which Lincoln had planned with Gustavus V. Fox, 
Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was to consist of the powerful warship Pow- 
hatan with three smaller vessels, the steamer Baltic, and three tugs to take the 
provisions into the fort. By Seward's officious meddling, over the heads of the 
Navy Department, the Powhatan was detached from the expedition and sent to 
Pensacola, Florida. The tugs all failed to reach the scene of the rendezvous out- 
side Charleston harbor. The other vessels, powerless to render aid to Anderson, 
lay rolling in the heavy sea off the bar during the entire bombardment, waiting 
vainly for the Powhatan to arrive. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



545 



wrote Lowell, brought all the free states to their feet as one 
man." Greeley was enthusiastic ; Fernando Wood, addressing 
a huge patriotic mass meeting in Union Square, New York, 
cried, ^^I am with you in this contest: we know no party now." 
Douglas hastened to pledge the support of the Democrats of the 
North, declaring, There can be no neutral in this war — only 
patriots or traitors." The ex-presidents. Pierce and Buchanan, 
who had been so conspicuously under the influence of the South- 
ern statesmen while in the White House, rallied to Lincoln's 
support. "The North will sustain the administration almost to 
a man," wrote Buchanan, "and it ought to be sustained at all 
hazards."^ The actual outbreak of war and Lincoln's call for 
troops stimulated an equal enthusiasm in the South. Volun- 
teers flocked to answer President Davis's call for 100,000 men, 
and the Confederate Congress met in extra session to pass meas- 
ures for the financial, industrial, and military security of the 
Confederacy. 

The week following the fall of Fort Sumter was crowded 
with events of the greatest importance. On Monday, April 15, 
Lincoln issued his proclamation. On Tuesday the militia of 
Massachusetts, trained for weeks by Governor John A. Andrew, 
began to muster. On Wednesday the Sixth Massachusetts 
regiment started for Washington^ and the state of Virginia se- 
ceded. On Thursday the federal authorities abandoned Harpers 
Ferry, burning the armory and destroying most of the arms. 
On Friday the Massachusetts troops, marching from station to 
station through Baltimore, were attacked by a mob, and a 
bloody affray followed in which four soldiers and several of the 
assailants were killed — the first bloodshed of the Civil War. 
The same day Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of the Atlantic 
coast from South Carolina to Florida. On Saturday Robert E. 
Lee, after a harrowing inward struggle between his love for the 
Union and his devotion to his state, resigned his commission in 
the United States army^ deeming, in the words of Alexander H. 

iThe South was surprised at the "desertion" of the men whom they re- 
garded as their friends. See a number of quotations from the Southern press 
on this subject in Rhodes, Vol. Ill, p. 399, note 3. 



546 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Stephens, that his state had never parted with her sovereign 
right to demand the ultimate allegiance of her citizens." He had 
been informally tendered the command of the Federal army, 
but he chose to accept his commission from the governor of 
Virginia. Lee was the soul of honor — like Bayard, a ^'knight 
without fear or reproach." He hated slavery and cherished 
the Union. That such a man, and hundreds of gentlemen like 
him in the South, should have been compelled to make such a 
choice is a distressing proof of the power of an established 
social order to sweep men along in its current.^ 

The defection of Virginia from the Union brought secession 
up to the banks of the Potomac and planted the Stars and Bars 
within sight of the Capitol. Washington was poorly defended. 
Officeholders and citizens were leaving in something of a panic, 
and rumors were current that Beauregard was going to use 
his South Carolina troops for the capture of the city. The 
President shared the anxiety, pacing the floor of his office in the 
White House and gazing down the Potomac in vain for the ap- 
pearance of the boats which he expected to bring reenforce- 
ments via Chesapeake Bay. By the order of Mayor Brown of 
Baltimore the Marylanders had destroyed direct railroad con- 
nections and telegraphic communication with the North. Regi- 
ments from New York and Boston, coming by the circuitous 

lAs it is unjust to call such men as Lee "traitors" for their interpretation of 
their duty of allegiance, so it is unfair to use their names to cover the evU of 
slavery. One sometimes reads such sentences as, "The civilization which pro- 
duced a Robert E. Lee could not have been altogether bad." But the de- 
testable institution of slavery no more "produced" Robert E. Lee than the 
corruptions of Imperial Rome produced Marcus Aurelius. It is true, in a 
sense, that the discussion of slavery today is, as Goldwin Smith remarked, "like 
trampling on a grave." Yet to refrain from a discussion of slavery is to re- 
nounce writing the history of the Civil War. Professor McLaughlin seems to 
me to have stated in admirable terms the spirit in which such discussion should 
be approached: "We often find in life gentle and refined people who tolerate a 
system of industrial or social intolerance which one would expect them to reject. 
One ought to be allowed to attack evils in an industrial and social system with- 
out being charged with attacking the conscience and character of all who are 
caught up and entangled in that system" ("Steps in the Development of Ameri- 
can Democracy," p. 139, note). 



THE CIVIL WAR 



547 



way of Chesapeake Bay and Annapolis and relaying the torn-up 
tracks as they advanced, finally marched into Washington on 
April 25, and the capital felt safe. There was really little cause 
for anxiety. The Confederate government had no intention of 
marching troops across the soil of the "sovereign states" of 
North Carolina and Virginia. The South, overestimating the 
forces at Washington, was thinking far more of her own pro- 
tection than of delivering an attack on the North. Richmond 
was as much "panic-stricken" as Washington. 

Lincoln succeeded better in his hope to stem the tide of se- 
cession than in his determination to hold Fort Sumter. To be 
sure, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee followed Vir- 
ginia out of the Union, but the four other slaveholding states — 
Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri — were kept loyal. 
Except in Delaware, where slaves were very few, the task was 
difficult, and it was accomplished largely through the tact- 
ful, conciliatory patience of President Lincoln. He summoned 
Mayor Brown to the White House and agreed not to send more 
troops through the excited city of Baltimore if their passage 
via Perryville and Annapolis were not interfered with. When 
the loyal Governor Hicks convened the legislature at Frederick 
City, Lincoln had General Scott show enough force to encourage 
the Unionist sentiment, without giving the secessionists provo- 
cation for making a disturbance. The result was the triumph 
of Union feeling in the state. A solid loyal delegation was 
elected for the extra session of Congress which Lincoln had 
called for July 4. By the middle of May the governor was 
strong enough to dismiss the secessionist militia in Baltimore, 
repair the railroad and telegraph communications with the 
North, and raise four regiments to fill the state's quota of the 
troops called for by Lincoln's proclamation.^ Of course, thou- 
sands volunteered for the Confederate ranks. When Lee's army 

1 After the defeat of the Union army in the summer of 1861, Secretary of 
War Cameron, fearing that Maryland might secede, took measures of repression 
unwarranted by the Constitution. The press was censored, and several members 
of the legislature were seized without warrants and imprisoned (with other sus- 
pects from Kentucky and Missouri) in forts in New York and Boston Harbors. 



S48 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



launched its great invasion of the North in the Gettysburg 
campaign of 1863, the song that went down the swinging col- 
umn was ^'Maryland, my Maryland." 

Lincoln's task of keeping his native state of Kentucky in the 
Union was harder. Governor Magoffin had answered his call 
for troops with an indignant refusal. The legislature was de- 
termined that the state should remain neutral. Even so loyal a 
Unionist as Crittenden approved this policy^ believing that Ken- 
tucky, interposed as a buffer between the two hostile sections, 
could keep them from war. Though he saw the folly of such 
a hope, Lincoln treated it with consideration. He used three 
able Kentuckians to win over the state. Major Anderson was 
stationed at Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River, with instruc- 
tions to receive volunteers from Kentucky and Virginia. L. H. 
Rousseau, a state senator, was commissioned to raise a brigade 
of Kentuckians for the United States army at Camp Joe Holt, 
on the Indiana side of the river. A third Kentuckian, William 
Nelson, a young naval officer, was given leave of absence to or- 
ganize and supply with arms the Unionist volunteers in the 
central part of the state. In spite of the secessionist influence of 
"Governor Magoffin, the elections in May for the extra session 
of Congress resulted in the return of nine Unionist members out 
of a delegation of ten. The state remained in the Union, but 
the names of Breckinridge, Buckner, Hood, and Albert Sidney 
Johnston are proof of the strength which Kentucky furnished 
to the Confederacy. 

In Missouri it actually came to civil war. Francis P. Blair, 
Jr., of St. Louis, a strong Union man and a brother of Lincoln's 
Postmaster-General, raised four regiments of ^'Home Guards," 
chiefly from the loyal German population of Missouri, and of- 
fered them to the President as the state's quota of militia. He 
secured the appointment of Captain Nathaniel Lyon as their 
commander. Governor Jackson, an out-and-out secessionist, 
also organized armed bands, called the ^'Minute Men," and 
established Camp Jackson, on the outskirts of the city, with 
the object of seizing the arsenal. When Lyon discovered that 



THE CIVIL WAR 



549 



Jackson was receiving arms and ammunition from the Confed- 
erate government at Montgomery, he attacked Camp Jackson, 
drove the governor out, and, following him up the river, seized 
the state capital of Jefferson City (June 15). Jackson and his 
general. Sterling Price^ withdrew to the southern part of the 
state, along the western slopes of the Ozark Mountains, to 
receive reenforcements from the state of Arkansas, while a 
convention assembled at the capital established a Unionist 
government. 

Neither side won a complete victory in the border states. 
Although the upper tier were held officially in the Union, they 
furnished hundreds of thousands of volunteers to the Confed- 
erate armies ; and, on the other hand, while Virginia, North Car- 
olina, Arkansas, and Tennessee seceded, large districts of three 
of these states remained loyal and eventually supplied some 
200,000 to the armies of the North. In eastern Tennessee, for 
example, the vote on secession, on June 8, was 14,780 for and 
32,923 against, while the central and western parts of the state 
voted' in the affirmative by 90,000 to 14,000. The forty-eight 
counties of Virginia west of the Alleghenies cast about 30,000 
votes against secession in May, 1861. When Governor Letcher 
sent troops across the mountains to defeat the design of 
these counties to ^'secede from secession," General George B. 
McClellan, in command of the Ohio militia on the northern 
bank of the river, sent aid to the West Virginia Unionists. In 
a five weeks' campaign (June-July) McClellan, with greatly 
superior forces, had little trouble in clearing the Confederate 
troops out of the counties.^ A convention at Wheeling had 
chosen F. H. Pierpont governor and established a legislature 
embracing as a nucleus the forty-six members of the Virginia 
convention who had voted against secession. This Rump Par- 
liament" elected United States senators, who were received and 

iMcClellan's West Virginia campaign was of slight military magnitude, but 
it had the important effect of cutting the main line of the Baltimore and Ohio 
Railroad, which ran across the northern part of the state, and of bringing 
McClellan into a fateful prominence as "the man of the hour." 



550 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



seated at Washington. Their new state, at first called Kanawha, 
was formally admitted to the Union in 1863 as West Virginia. 
McClellan formed the ambitious plan of marching his victorious 
army southward, ^'liberating" the Unionists of the mountain 
regions of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia and attack- 
ing Richmond (which had become the Confederate capital in 
May) from the rear. But his plan was spoiled by the defeat of 
the Union army in Virginia, which we shall relate presently. 

To sum up the important developments between the fall of 
Fort Sumter and the midsummer of 1861 : Four new states had 
been added to the Confederacy, bringing the total population of 
the seceded area to 8,700,000 as against 22,700,000 in the 23 
state3 of the Union. As 3,500,000 of the population of the South 
were slaves, the real superiority of the North in man power was 
about four to one. In wealth, facilities of transportation, variety 
of industries, mobility of capital, control of commerce, abun- 
dance of food supply, — in short, in every economic aspect (unless 
the great volume of cotton exports could be maintained), — the 
North was vastly superior. To offset this disparity in numbers 
and resources, the South had some marked advantages. They 
would fight a defensive war on their own soil, for the protection 
of their homes and their property. Their men were on the 
whole better material from which to make soldiers, and the 
Mexican War had been a valuable training-ground for many of 
their officers. Their president was a distinguished graduate of 
West Pointy a commander with experience in the field, an ex- 
Secretary of War, and acquainted with the military personnel 
of the country, while Lincoln was a civilian who had to learn by 
slow and painful experience that minimum of tactical and 
strategic knowledge which he needed as commander in chief of 
the forces of the United States. Furthermore, the South, firm 
in the faith that Cotton is king," looked confidently to Great 
Britain, whose queen had recognized the Confederacy in May 
as a belligerent power, to break the blockade which threatened 
famine to the cotton mills of Lancashire. The tone in the press 
and the Parliament of aristocratic England left no doubt as to 



THE CIVIL WAR 



where the sympathies of the governing classes of the island lay/ 
Finally, absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their cause, 
the South entered the war as a holy crusade, repeating the lan- 
guage of the men of 1776 and resolved to defend their liberty 
and independence to the last man and the last dollar.^ 

So the men of the North and the men of Dixie confronted each 
other in arms in the midsummer of 1861. The ^^irrepressible 
conflict" had come. Two systems of social and economic life, 
which had engendered two systems of political theory, irrecon- 
cilable, reciprocally contemptuous, mutually destructive, stood 
grimly determined to fight out on the field of battle the solu- 
tion which forty years of unconvincing compromise had failed 
to furnish. 

The Field of Battle 

From the surrender of Major Anderson at Fort Sumter in 
April, 1 86 1, to the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox in 
April, 1865, one supreme purpose guided the entire policy of 
the governments on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. 
Every measure of diplomacy, finance, public law, and economic 
legislation was taken with a view to the accomplishment of the 
supreme purpose — the winning of the war. All eyes were fixed 
on the advance and the retreat of the armies. Everybody's ears 
were strained for news ^'from the front." In order, therefore, 

^Far as the South had departed from Jefferson's views on the moral evil 
of slavery, they still held to his belief in the virtual coercion of Great Britain 
through commercial pressure. "There is the key," said a Charleston merchant 
to the correspondent of the London Times, pointing to a wharf piled high with 
cotton bales, "which will open all our ports and put us into John Bull's strong 
box as well." A Charleston paper advised an embargo on cotton as the weapon 
to force the recognition of the Confederacy. 

2 How little this spirit was realized in the North is shown by Seward's opti- 
mistic program of the reduction of "a state a month" to allegiance to the Union, 
and the quite general opinion that secession was "the work of a strong and un- 
scrupulous minority," who could be cowed by a show of force. Lincoln, in his 
address to Congress on July 4, could still question "whether there is today a 
majority of the legally qualified voters of any state, except, perhaps, South 
Carolina, in favor of disunion." 



552 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



to give as clear a view as possible of the progress of the conflict, 
we shall postpone to the following section important matters 
touching the public and private life of North and South during 
the war and here confine our attention to the field of battle. 

Not that we shall attempt to follow in detail the marching 
and countermarching of dozens of armies, invading or defend- 
ing the enormous area stretching 800 miles from the Potomac 
to the Gulf and 1700 miles from the Atlantic seaboard to 
the western boundary of Texas. The Official Records of the 
Union and Confederate Armies and Navies in the War of the 
Rebellion fill 130 large volumes and describe over 2000 en- 
gagements, of which 1 50 are dignified by the name of battles." 
Livermore's Numbers and Losses in the Civil War" estimates 
the Union enlistments on a three years' basis at 1,556,878 and 
the Confederate at 1,082,119. A bare list of the titles of works 
dealing with the military and political history of the war would 
fill many more pages than we have to devote to the description 
of its course.^ Without trespassing, therefore, on the techni- 
cal field of military strategy and tactics or noticing the minor 
operations, we shall follow the few great campaigns on which 
the fortunes of the struggle were staked. 

At the beginning of July, 1861, there were in the camps 
around Washington about 30,000 raw and undisciplined troops, 
whom General Scott wished to train in garrison duty. Some 
thirty-five miles to the southwest General Beauregard was in 
command of 22,000 Confederates at the important station of 
Manassas, the junction of the Manassas Gap and the Orange 
and Alexandria railroads. In the Shenandoah Valley, to the 
west, lay 9000 Confederates, commanded by Joseph E. John- 
ston, lately Quartermaster-General of the army of the United 
States. A mediocre general (Patterson) with a superior force 
confronted Johnston at Harpers Ferry. 

The diminished Congress of the United States met in extra 
session on July 4. The Confederate Congress was called to 

^One list, published only a year after the conclusion of the war (Bartlett's 
Literature of the Rebellion"), contains 6073 such titles. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



553 



meet at Richmond on July 20. The Northern press was clam- 
oring for action. A sharp, prompt blow must end the war at 
once. The rebel" Congress must not be allowed to meet. 
Foreign nations, especially Great Britain, which had recognized 
the belligerency of the Confederacy, must be shown that the 
United States had the power to nip sedition in the bud. Be- 
sides, the three months' term of the volunteers was soon to 
expire. To what end had they been called and drilled in 
Washington if they were not to be used ? ^^On to Richmond ! " 
was the cry. Scott protested that the troops were not ready ; 
some of them had been in camp less than a week. General 
Irvin McDowell, who was the field commander, agreed with 
his chief, but reluctantly consented to move on Manassas if 
he could be assured (as he was) that Patterson would hold 
Johnston in the valley. So the 30,000 set forth, an undisci- 
plined host, hastily brigaded, straggling by the way to pick 
berries or take naps under the trees, and accompanied by sev- 
eral congressmen who rode out to see the victory. Before 
McDowell had completed his plans for crossing Bull Run, the 
little stream which flows just north of Manassas, Johnston had 
slipped away from Patterson and joined Beauregard with three 
of his four brigades. Long before dawn of Sunday, July 20, 
McDowell launched his well-planned offensive from the north 
and west to turn the Confederate left flank. Through the in- 
tolerable heat of the midday hours the battle raged about the 
Henry House Hill, where Thomas J. Jackson stood ^^like a 
stone wall'' between the Confederates and defeat. President 
Davis, arriving on the field from Richmond in the early after- 
noon, was met by a fugitive who told him that the battle was 
lost. But at 3.30 the rest of Johnston's army arrived from the 
valley and was forthwith thrown into the fray. The Confed- 
erates rallied for a bayonet charge which decided the fortunes 
of the day. Exhausted by more than twelve continuous hours 
of marching and fighting, the Union troops broke and fled. All 
the afternoon and night they were pouring back into Washing- 
ton, leaving guns and baggage by the way, as if in a race with 
the discomfited congressmen to see which could reach the 



554 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



shelter of the city fortifications first. Great was their relief 
and surprise when they discovered that the Confederates were 
not on their heels.^ 

In spite of the humiliation and chagrin^ the defeat at Bull 
Run was a blessing in disguise for the North. It swept away 
once and for all the fool's paradise of easy optimism and faith 
in the collapse of the ^'rebelHon" at the first touch of the 
Ithuriel spear point of the North. On the morrow of the battle 
the disillusioned government set to work in earnest to pre- 
pare for the war. Lincoln rode through the encampments of 
Washington, encouraging the men with words of kindly cheer. 
Congress met the emergency with courage. It ratified the Presi- 
dent's exercise of extraordinary war powers, authorized loans 
and taxes, and passed a resolution to the effect that the war 
was waged ^'not for conquest or subjugation, or to overthrow 
or interfere with the rights of the established institutions of the 
sovereign states, but to maintain the supremacy of the Consti- 
tution and to preserve the Union." On the eve of its adjourn- 
ment, August I, Congress passed a Confiscation Act, releasing 
from their masters' claims any slaves who were employed in 
military duties against the United States.^ To this the Con- 
federate Congress replied with a Sequestration Act, ordering 

i"Stonewall" Jackson, standing on the heights above Bull Run with Presi- 
dent Davis after the victory, oblivious of his wounded hand in the exaltation 
which battle always inspired in him, begged to be allowed to follow up the 
retreating foe. "With 10,000 troops," he said, "I will take Washington tomor- 
row." But the Confederates were in no condition to assault the strong defenses 
of the city. They too were raw levies, and had perhaps been saved from a rout 
as complete as that of the Union army only by the fortunate arrival of John- 
ston's fourth brigade. The commander himself thought that the Confederates 
were "more disorganized by victory than the United States army by defeat." 

2 When fugitive slaves had come within the lines of General B. F. Butler's 
command at Fortress Monroe in the early summer, he refused to give them up 
to their masters and set them to work on his own fortifications. He called them 
"contraband of war," and "contraband" continued to be the nickname of the 
confiscated negroes throughout the war. Lincoln insisted, but not with very 
great success, that only those negroes should be retained who came within the 
definition of the Confiscation Act. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



555 



Southerners who owed debts to the Northern merchants and 
bankers to pay the money into the Confederate treasury.^ 

McDowell's defeat made the choice of a new commander 
necessary, excellent as his conduct of the battle had been. The 
man to whom the administration turned, with the enthusiastic 
approval of the entire North, was the hero of the West Vir- 
ginia campaign. George B. McClellan, not yet thirty-five years 
old, a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Mexican 
War, had probably the best military education of all the gen- 
erals of the North. He was a magnificent organizer, a tireless 
worker, an inspiring commander, and withal a gentleman with 
a winning personality and the highest devotion to his country. 
He took the demoralized army of Bull Run and the tens of 
thousands of recruits that poured into the encampments about 
Washington and trained them into one of the most efficient 
armies that the world has ever seen. Yet he was a failure, 
because he didn't know how to use the great Army of the 
Potomac which he had trained. He talked much about what 
he was going to do, but he was never quite ready to act. His 
soldiers were too precious to risk. The responsibility of com- 
manding an army which by December had swelled to nearly 
200,000 men was too great for him; and indeed it might well 
have paralyzed the nerve of a man of riper years and experience. 
As month after month passed, and the administration and the 
people grew impatient of inaction, McClellan became a prey 
to obsessions which rendered him useless. He persisted in 
ridiculous exaggeration of Johnston's forces. When he himself 
had over 150,000 men and Johnston was vainly trying to get 
his army of 41,000 at Manassas reenforced by 1 5,000 or 20,000 

iThis act was expected to yield an enormous sum, as the war broke out in 
the spring, when the indebtedness of the South to the North was at its maxi- 
mum. The Richmond Dispatch estimated that Virginia's contribution alone 
would be "at least $15,000,000," and the New Orleans Delta put Louisiana's at 
$12,000,000. But the Southern planters and merchants preferred to pay neither 
their Northern creditors nor their own treasury. In December, 1863, the Con- 
federate Secretary of the Treasury reported only $1,812,550 received from the 
Sequestration Act. 



556 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



troops, McClellan wrote that the enemy had ^Hhree or four 
times" his own numbers. Worst of all, he nursed a grievance 
that he was not appreciated and that the ^ imbecile" adminis- 
tration at Washington was doing all it could to cause the ruin 
of his army. He quarreled with Stanton and Halleck and 
treated Lincoln with supercilious discourtesy. In the letters 
written to his wife at the time, and in ^'McClellan's Own Story," 
an apology written twenty years later, he appears in a most 
unfavorable light, as an inspired genius who had saved his 
country," whereas he had really only saved his army — from 
fighting. So the autumn and winter passed amid anxieties and 
vexations for the North, the expenses mounting from $175,000 
to over $1,000,000 a day, incompetence and corruption in the 
War Department under Cameron, inefficiency and insubordi- 
nation in the Department of the West under the vain, con- 
temptuous Fremont, an ugly quarrel with England over the 
Trent affair, an almost undisguised hostility on the part of the 
ruling and commercial classes in Great Britain and France, — 
seven months of war with no step forward, but only the monot- 
onous echo of the patrols of the great idle army on which the 
hopes of millions were fixed: ^^All quiet along the Potomac! " 

Before McClellan started his long-deferred advance on Rich- 
mond, in March, 1862, events of the first importance had hap- 
pened in the Mississippi Valley and on the Atlantic coast. We 
have seen how Governor Magoffin tried to keep Kentucky 
neutral at the outbreak of the war and how careful President 
Lincoln was not to drive the state into the arms of the Con- 
federacy by coercion or invasion. But so anxious was the gov- 
ernment at Richmond to win this great state, which extended 
from Virginia to the Mississippi and whose possession would 
bring the borders of the Confederacy to the Ohio, that General 
Polk was allowed to seize Columbus early in September, 1861, 
and extend his lines to Bowling Green, near the center of the 
state. The political and military effects of this move appeared 
forthwith. The legislature of Kentucky, after calling in vain 
on Polk to withdraw his troops, passed measures definitely 
aligning the state on the Union side, and the Federal forces 



THE CIVIL WAR 



557 



in the West prepared to break Polk's line. The command of 
the Union armies west of the Alleghenies was divided between 
two generals. W. H. Halleck's authority reached from Missouri 
eastward to the center of Kentucky, and Don Carlos BuelPs 
extended from that point to the Alleghenies. BuelPs plan was 
to march southward to rally the Unionists of eastern Tennessee 
to his banners ; and an auspicious beginning was made when his 
brigadier general George H. Thomas caught a Confederate army 
which had come through the Cumberland Gap into eastern 
Kentucky under General Zollicoffer, and defeated it at Mill 
Springs, January 19, 1862. It was the first gleam of success 
for the Federal arms since the disaster at Bull Run. But Buell's 
plans were interrupted by developments further west, where 
in the short space of fifty miles the four great rivers the Missis- 
sippi, the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee mingle 
their waters. Halleck's brigadier general in this region was 
a short, compact, taciturn man of thirty-nine, who, since his 
service in the Mexican War, had waged an unequal battle with 
poverty, obscurity, laziness, and liquor. Lincoln's call to arms 
found him a clerk in his father's leather store in Galena, 
Illinois, and it instantly transformed him into the man of 
destiny — Ulysses S. Grant. 

To guard the interior of Tennessee and protect the Memphis 
and Charleston railroad, the Confederates had built Forts Henry 
and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers respec- 
tively, close to the Kentucky line. The forts were back to back 
and only twelve miles apart, so that troops could be moved from 
one to the other in a short day's march. Grant got permission 
from Halleck to attack these forts and started up the Tennessee 
River from Paducah with 15,000 men, supported by Flag- 
Officer Foote with a fleet of seven formidably armed gunboats. 
Foote's heavy cannon reduced Fort Henry easily enough, but 
not until General Tilghman had transferred practically all his 
garrison of 3000 men to Fort Donelson. Then Grant marched 
across the ^'isthmus," while Foote took the gunboats around by 
the rivers. But the capture of Fort Donelson was as difficult as 
that of Fort Henry had been easy. The higher guns, command- 



558 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



ing the winding approaches of the Cumberland, kept Foote's 
fleet from effective work, and before Grant was ready to attack, 
Albert Sidney Johnston, the ablest Confederate general in the 
West, had increased the garrison of Fort Donelson to 20,000 
men. Grant invested the fort, but the Confederates, making a 
sortie in the early morning of February 15, drove back his 
right wing under General McClernand and seemed to have a 
clear path of escape to Nashville. Unfortunately for them, 
they postponed their march until the morrow. Grant was on 
a gunboat in conference with Foote when he heard of Mc- 
Clernand's plight. Repairing to the scene at once, he restored 
the morale of the troops, launched a general attack, and before 
nightfall had recovered his original lines. The counsels of the 
commanders of the fort were at variance; the spirit of the 
garrison was broken. When General Buckner, who had been 
deserted by his colleagues, Floyd and Pillow, sent to Grant 
the next morning to ask terms, the Union commander replied : 
^'No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can 
be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works." 
Buckner surrendered with 14,000 prisoners, 20,000 stands of 
arms, and 48 pieces of artillery. 

The effect of the victory at Fort Donelson was tremendous. 
For the North it was the reparation of the disaster of Bull Run. 
^'The underpinning seems to have been knocked from under 
the rebellion," said Chase. Jefferson Davis, inaugurating the 
^^permanent" Confederate government at Richmond on Feb- 
ruary 22, spoke of ^'the recent serious disasters" as marking 
^^the darkest hour of our struggle."^ The sympathizers with 
the Confederacy in England, who had been proclaiming in press 
and Parliament that the North was beaten, were hushed.^ Ken- 
tucky was now secure for the Union. Buell entered Nashville 

1 Besides Donelson, the "disasters" were the defeat at Mill Springs (Jan- 
uary 19) and the capture of Roanoke Island (February 7). 

2 Henry Adams writes to his brother Charles Francis, Jr., from London, "The 
English on hearing of Donelson and the fall of Nashville, seem to think our 
dozen armies are already across the St. Lawrence and at the gates of Quebec" 
("A Cycle of Adams Letters" (W. C. Ford, Ed.), Vol. I, p. 120). 




The War in the Mississippi Valley 



56o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



without striking a blow. The first Confederate Hne of defense 
in the West was shattered, and the army of Johnston retired 
to Corinth, Mississippi. An imposing procession of more than 
80 Union steamers, loaded with exultant men, swept up the Ten- 
nessee toward the strategic points on the Alabama and Missis- 
sippi frontiers. By April Grant's army, 45,000 strong, was 
concentrated at Pittsburg Landing and Shiloh on the Tennessee 
River, only fifteen miles from the Mississippi border, and Buell, 
with 36,000 men, was on his way from Nashville to join him. 

In order to prevent this junction, Johnston and Beauregard 
led their army of 40,000 out of Corinth to attack Grant at 
Pittsburg Landing. The Union commander was taken by sur- 
prise. In his confident belief that the spirit of the Southern 
army had been broken by the disasters in Tennessee,^ he had 
neglected to fortify his position, although the enemy were but 
twenty miles away. The furious attack of the Confederates 
on the morning of April 6 drove in the Federal outposts, and 
Johnston boasted that he would water his horses in the Ten- 
nessee River that evening. But while the sun was still high 
the gallant commander was killed, leading a frontal attack on 
a strong Union position, and night fell with the desperate battle 
still undecided but with the Federal troops sadly demoralized.^ 
The next morning Buell and Lew Wallace brought 25,000 fresh 
men onto the field, and the tables were turned. Beauregard 
made a stubborn fight of eight hours against great odds, but 
was finally forced to retreat to Corinth, which he evacuated 
a few days later before the advance of the Federal army. 
The Confederates had lost 11,000 men and their great com- 
mander. The Union loss was 13,000. These numbers seem 
trifling when compared with the statistics of carnage in the 
recent World War, but no battle of our country's history 

1 Grant wrote in his "Memoirs" in 1884, "My opinion was and still is that 
immediately after the fall of Fort Donelson the way was open to the National 
forces all over the Southwest without much resistance." 

2 Nelson, arriving with the vanguard of Buell's army at the Tennessee River 
late in the afternoon of the first day of the battle, reported that he found 
" cowering under the river bank from 7000 to 10,000 men frantic with fright and 
utterly demoralized." 



THE CIVIL WAR 



had ever witnessed such slaughter as that at Shiloh. Thousands 
of homes in the West were plunged in mourning. Chicago was 
a city of gloom. 

As Grant had moved up the Tennessee, General Pope and Com- 
modore Foote went down the Mississippi in a parallel course, 
reducing the Confederate fortifications at Island No. lo, New 
Madrid, and Fort Pillow, and opening the great river as far as 
the beetling cliffs above Vicksburg. Meanwhile, ^'as the crown- 
ing stroke of adverse fortune," — to use the words of the Con- 
federate Secretary of War, — the Southerners saw the fall of the 
"Queen City'' at the mouth of the Mississippi. On the night of 
April 24 Flag-Officer David G. Farragut, commanding the West 
Gulf blockading squadron, with seventeen ships, ran the gauntlet 
of fire from Forts Jackson and St. Philip on the lower Mississippi, 
which guarded the approaches to New Orleans. It was the 
most spectacular event of the war as the fleet crept up the river 
through the blackness of night and smoke, its perilous path 
murkily lighted by the incessant fire of the Confederate guns 
and the high columns of pitchy flame rising from the fire rafts. 
^*At length," said Farragut, "the fire slackened, the smoke 
cleared off, and we saw to our surprise that we were above the 
forts." The way to New Orleans was open. Farragut reached 
the panic-stricken city the next day and anchored off the levee, 
where he found "ships, steamers, cotton, coal, etc. all in one 
common blaze." On May i General B. F. Butler occupied the 
city with Union troops and ruled it for six months with a ruth- 
lessness which has made his name a byword in the South to 
this day. Farragut sailed up the river to Vicksburg, but found 
his fleet too feeble to reduce the fortifications and returned to 
New Orleans. The Confederates then fortified Port Hudson, 
Louisiana, to protect the mouth of the Red River, through which 
vast suppHes of grain, horses, cattle, and produce were brought 
from Texas, Arkansas^ and western Louisiana to the eastern 
bank of the Mississippi. This important "bridge" of one 
hundred and twenty-five miles from Port Hudson to Vicksburg 
was all of the Mississippi that was left to the Confederacy by 
the midsummer of 1862. 



562 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



While the Union armies and river fleets were achieving these 
victories in the Mississippi Valley, the blockading squadrons 
were tightening their cordon around the Atlantic and Gulf 
shores of the Confederate states. The South had no navy and 
virtually no merchant marine from which a navy could be im- 
provised. For, in spite of magnificent advantages for ship- 
building, this industry had failed to attract capital away from 
the absorbing monopoly of slaves and cotton.^ In 1854 there 
were constructed 485,763 tons of shipping in the free states, 
as against 48,053 in the slave states — and of that 48,053 more 
than half was built in the states of Maryland and Delaware. 
Maine alone launched 168,632 tons in that year, to 11,862 from 
all the states from the mouth of the Potomac to the mouth of 
the Rio Grande. While the South was trying to buy ships 
abroad, the North was busy converting every kind of craft — 
merchantmen, excursion boats, pleasure yachts, and tugs — into 
ships of war. By the close of 1861 the Federal navy consisted 
of 264 ships, with 2575 guns and over 20,000 seamen. Four 
main squadrons guarded the 3500 miles of blockaded coast 
from Virginia to Texas, to prevent cotton from leaving the 
Southern ports and military supplies from entering them. The 
capture of Hatteras Inlet (August 29, 1861), Port Royal (No- 
vember 7), Roanoke Island (February 8^ 1862), and Fort 
Pulaski, guarding the entrance to Savannah (April 11), gave 
the Federal navy control of all the important points on the 
Atlantic coast except Wilmington and Charleston, but until 
Farragut's exploit at New Orleans no considerable Confederate 
port on the Gulf was taken. At first the South tried to bring 
pressure to bear on England to break the blockade, by with- 
holding cotton which might easily have been run through the 

iThe New Orleans Delta said: "We possess the finest ship timber in the 
world, in inexhaustible quantities, which is easy of access and can be transported 
cheaply to any point. Almost every day this timber is cut down, split, hewed 
and sawed into proper lengths and shapes, and sent to the Northern ship-yards 
. . . where it is used in the construction of vessels, many of which come back 
here and engage in the transportation of Southern produce." North Carolina, 
once a great shipbuilding state, had to rely even for craft to carry its coasting- 
trade " on the canal boats of Norfolk and the New England vessels." 



THE CIVIL WAR 



563 



scattered Federal squadrons. Only 19,127 bales were exported 
in 1861 as against 615,000 in i860. But as their hopes of in- 
tervention by England and France faded, the Southerners de- 
veloped the hazardous but profitable business of exchanging 
cotton for munitions, clothing, medicines, and luxuries by means 
of narrow, swift, lead-colored blockade-runners, plying between 
Wilmington, Charleston, Mobile, or Galveston and the West 
Indian ports of Nassau or Havana/ 

While Grant's victorious Donelson army was being trans- 
ported up the Tennessee, the South made a bold attempt to 
break the blockade on the Atlantic coast. Raising the 40-gun 
frigate Merrimac, which had been sunk when the Federal officer 
abandoned the Norfolk navy yard on the secession of Virginia, 
the Confederates cut her down to the water's edge and erected 
a large rectangular casemate on her hull, whose sloping sides 
they covered with 4-inch iron plates. To her prow they fas- 
tened an iron ram. This formidable but slow and unwieldy 
ironclad, rechristened the Virginia, crept into Hampton Roads 
on March 8, 1862, and proceeded to demolish the wooden ships 
of the Federal navy, whose shots glanced off her sides like 
pebbles from a sling. She rammed a hole in the 30-gun sloop 
Cumberland and sank her. The 50-gun frigate Congress ran 
aground to escape capture, but the Virginia set her aflame with 
red-hot shot. The steam frigate Minnesota was also aground, 
waiting like a trembling animal at bay for her fate. But the 
Virginia, leaking and her engines overstrained, drew off to 
prepare for the destruction of the rest of the ships the next 
day. Four hours later another outlandish craft steamed into 
Hampton Roads. This was the Monitor, designed by Captain 
Ericsson and built in three months' time to thwart the Virginia. 
From the center of the Monitor's deck, which was flush with 
the water, rose a revolving turret 20 feet in diameter, armed 
with two ii-inch guns. She was nicknamed "a cheese box on 

1 Lieutenant Colonel Freemantle, an English visitor, wrote in his "Three 
Months in the Southern States" (p. 202) that he saw in Wilmington, in June, 
1863, "eight large steamers, all handsome, leaden colored vessels, which ply 
their trade with the greatest regularity." 



564 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



a raft." During the entire morning of March 9 these two 
strange ironclads bombarded each other with little harm to 
either; and then the Virginia withdrew, leaving the wooden 
ships safe — but henceforth as obsolete for naval warfare as 
Noah's Ark.^ 

Month after month McClellan held his fine army inactive on 
the Potomac, while Johnston's force at Manassas, of less than 
one third of his own, was all that stood between him and Rich- 
mond. McClellan persisted in believing that he was confronted 
by an army vastly superior to his own, and superciliously ig- 
nored both the administration's entreaties that he should march 
on Richmond and his own subordinates' better estimate of the 
enemy's strength. Even Lincoln's positive order for a general 
advance on February 2 2 failed to budge the Fabian commander. 
On that day, however, Johnston abandoned his dangerous posi- 
tion at Manassas. McClellan followed him — but not to Rich- 
mond. To the President's disappointment, he changed his plans 
and decided to take the Army of the Potomac down to the, 
mouth of Chesapeake Bay and approach Richmond by the 
peninsula between the York and James Rivers. Relieved to 
see McClellan move in any direction, the administration ap- 
proved his plan, but only with the understanding that the city 
of Washington must not be left unprotected. The troops were 
ferried down the Potomac, and on April 2 McClellan joined 
them at his base at Fortress Monroe. The Confederate general 
Magruder held a thirteen-mile line between the rivers, thinly 
defended by some 11,000 men. McClellan should have broken 
this line like a thread and been on his way up the peninsula, 
but instead he settled down with an elaborate train to besiege 
Yorktown — and scold the administration. After delaying him 
for more than a month before Yorktown, which bristled with 
wooden guns, the Confederate forces slipped away, leaving 
IMcClellan with his empty prize. The Union general followed 
with the utmost caution, taking two weeks to cover the forty 

^Neither boat was destined to last long. When the Confederates evacuated 
Norfolk in May, they blew up the Virginia. The Monitor, unable to stand 
rough seas, sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras in December. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



565 



miles between Yorktown and his new base at White House on 
the Pamunkey River. Toward the end of May the Federal 
army was encamped on both sides of the Chickahominy River, 
the advance posts being near Fair Oaks station^ with the church 
spires of Richmond clearly visible less than five miles away. 
All this time the Confederates had been strengthening their 
army, until Johnston had 63,000 troops to oppose McClellan's 
110,000. On May 31 Johnston attacked the two Federal army 
corps south of the Chickahominy River, which had been con- 
verted into a torrent by heavy rains. He would have routed 
McClellan's left wing completely had not General Sumner led 
his troops across the submerged and swaying bridge and saved 
the day. Johnston was knocked from his horse by a piece of 
shell, and on the next day Robert E. Lee assumed command of 
the Army of Virginia. 

After the discomfiture of the Confederates at Fair Oaks, it 
was expected that McClellan would concentrate his army south 
of the Chickahominy and move directly on Richmond. The 
city was in a state of panic during the May days. It seemed as 
though its doom were sealed. The destruction of the Virginia 
left the way open to the Federal gunboats, which had gone up 
the James to Drewry's Bluff, within seven miles of the Confed- 
erate capital. The government packed up its archives to send to 
Columbia and Lynchburg. President Davis appointed a day of 
public prayer. A hostile editor of Richmond pictured him as 
^'standing in a corner telling his beads, and relying on a miracle 
to save the country." But still McClellan did not move. He 
was waiting for reenforcements. President Lincoln had prom- 
ised, now that his army was again between Washington and 
Richmond, to send him McDowell's 35,000 men, who had been 
kept back to defend the Federal capital when the Army of the 
Potomac had gone down to Fortress Monroe. 

But McClellan waited for his reenforcements in vain. Across 
the Blue Ridge, in the valley of the Shenandoah, Stonewall 
Jackson was waging the most wonderful campaign of the war. 
The Federal general Banks was at the lower end of the valley 
with 10,000 men, guarding the "back door" to Washington. 



566 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Further west was Fremont, in command of an army which was 
rapidly swelling to 20,000, while McDowell's corps lay close to 
Washington. Jackson had only 17,000 men, but he made them 
do the work of a host, moving them from point to point with a 
rapidity that earned them the name of ^'Jackson's foot cavalry." 
He outwitted the pompous Fremont, the impetuous Banks, and 
the clever Shields at every point. He prevented the junction of 
the Federal armies and accomplished the reunion of his own 
raiding parties with a punctuality that was little short of mirac- 
ulous. He drove Banks down the valley and across the Potomac ; 
and when McDowell's corps (which had been promised to 
McClellan) were sent to join with Shields and Fremont to cut 
him off, he dashed back up the valley, eluding his pursuers and 
crossing the last bridge of safety just as Fremont's troops ap- 
peared on the opposite bank of the swollen Shenandoah and 
wept with wrath and mortification, as they stood barred by the 
few yards of swirling torrent." Then the great strategist slipped 
out of the valley and entrained for Richmond, leaving his mys- 
tified antagonists groping for him like bandaged boys in a game 
of blindman's buff. ^^In forty-eight days he had marched 676 
miles, fought five hard battles, accomplishing in each his pur- 
pose, baffled three Federal armies, his 17,000 matched against 
50,000, brought off prisoners and booty unmeasured, ruined the 
campaign of McClellan, and stricken the North with terror." 
'^The fate of Richmond," say Wood and Edmonds, was de- 
cided not on the banks of the Chickahominy, but by the waters 
of the Shenandoah." 

Jackson joined Lee at Richmond on June 23, and the two 
great commanders laid their plans to drive McClellan out of 
the peninsula. On the twenty-seventh the Confederates, 55,000 
strong, fell upon the 25,000 troops of General Fitz-John Porter 
at Gaines's Mill, north of the Chickahominy. The Unionists 
made a plucky fight but were borne back by the weight of num- 
bers, and a rout like that of Bull Run might well have followed 
Lee's call for a final charge on the wavering line had not two 
brigades from Sumner's corps arrived on the field in the nick of 
time to cover the retreat. Lee's bold stroke north of the river 



THE CIVIL WAR 



567 



had left only 25,000 men under Magruder to protect the capital. 
McClellan, with three times that number, had then the golden 
chance to pounce on Richmond, but Magruder, ^Hhe prince of 
bluff," marched his men back and forth like a stage army, 
keeping up a furious discharge of cannonry, until McClellan 
was convinced that he ^Vould have to meet more than 100,000 
men if he marched on Richmond." Instead, he executed a mas- 
terly retreat across the peninsula from the Chickahominy to the 
James, ineffectually harassed by Jackson and Lee. Reaching 
the James, he took a strong position on Malvern Hill, against 
which the Confederates delivered a frontal attack on July i. 
The Union army hurled back the impetuous charge with heavy 
artillery fire and deadly infantry volleys, driving brigade after 
brigade across the open field at the foot of the hill. The defeat 
of Gaines's Mill was wiped out. In the week's fighting across the 
peninsula the Union army had lost 15,800 men to 20,100 for the 
Confederates. The morale of McClellan's troops at Malvern 
Hill was perfect. The way to Richmond was again open. But 
McClellan, to the chagrin of his best corps commanders, fell 
back down the river to Harrison's Landing, under the protec- 
tion of the Federal gunboats. Thus ended the famous Penin- 
sular campaign. 

McClellan has found defenders, though none to take him at 
the full value of his own rating in his letters and his apologia. 
No doubt he was sometimes hampered by political interference 
(as what general has not been ! ). The administration annoyed 
him by its importunity for an advance, and he had enemies 
in the cabinet. Lincoln appointed his corps commanders with- 
out consulting him. He was denied (for reasons which we have 
seen) the promised reenforcement by McDowell's corps. But 
none of these things should have prevented a resolute com- 
mander with McClellan's advantages from taking Richmond. 
He did not need McDowell's troops. If he was deceived in his 
estimate of the Confederate forces, it was his own fault. The 
cavalry of Lee rode completely around his army on both sides 
of the Chickahominy in June and could report the number and 
disposition of his forces ; yet he, almost in sight of Richmond, 



568 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



could be fooled by Magruder's bluster and by clever lies in 
the newspapers into believing himself confronted by a mighty 
host. Macbeth himself was never daunted by so unsubstan- 
tial visions. Moreover, McClellan was always attending to 
some more important matter in some other spot at the moment 
of battle. When the armies were fighting at Fair Oaks on the 
southern side of the river, he was on the northern side; and 
when they fought at Gaines's Mill on the northern side, he was 
on the southern side. He was not on the field at Williamsburg 
at the beginning of the campaign or at Malvern Hill at its 
close, though he was fully aware of the inspiration which his 
presence gave the troops. He nursed the grievance that he was 
unappreciated and unsupported by the administration, and ex- 
pressed his grievance in language at once querulous, boastful, 
and insolent.^ The task intrusted to him was too great for his 
powers. Because he had been successful on a small stage, he 
was suddenly called, with the most confident expectations, to 
fill a very large stage. In the year from Bull Run to Malvern 

iThe following are samples of McClellan's utterances during the campaign: 
" I learn that Stanton and Chase have fallen out. . . . Alas ! poor country that 
should have such rulers ! I tremble for my country when I think of these 
things. [He had other things to think of !] When I see such insane folly be- 
hind me, I feel that the final salvation of my country demands the utmost pru- 
dence on my part, and that I must not run the slightest risk of disaster [ !], for 
if anything happened to this army our cause would be lost. . . . But I will yet 
succeed, notwithstanding all they do and leave undone in Washington to pre- 
vent it. I would not have on my conscience what these men have for all the 
world." (To his wife, June 22.) "I know that a few more thousand men 
would have changed this battle [Gaines's Mill] from a defeat to a victory. As 
it is, the government must not and cannot hold me responsible for the result. 
... If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or 
to any other person in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this 
army." (To Secretary Stanton, June 28.) "I am ready for an attack now 
[three days after Malvern Hill] ; give me 24 hours even and I will defy all 
secession." (To his wife, July 4.) The victims of the "insane folly" at Wash- 
ington replied to McClellan's scoldings with kindly forbearance. Lincoln tele- 
graphed, July 3 : " I am satisfied that yourself, officers and men have done the 
best you could. All accounts say no better fighting was ever done. Ten thou- 
sands thanks for it." Stanton wrote, July 5, "Be assured that you have the 
support of this department and the government as cordially and faithfully as 
ever was rendered by man to man," 



THE CIVIL WAR 



569 



Hill he built and trained a great army. But his inability 
to use that army postponed for three years the fall of the 
Confederate capital. 

Bitter as was the disappointment at McClellan's failure, the 
North rallied with enthusiasm. Great mass meetings were held 
in the cities to pledge recruits and money. The governors of 
eighteen states offered Lincoln 300,000 more men. Generals 
Halleck and Pope were called from the West, the former to 
assume the direction from Washington of all the Union armies 
in the field, the latter to command the new Army of Virginia, 
50,000 strong^ composed of the forces of McDowell, Banks, 
and Fremont. Pope, spurred thereto by Stanton and Benjamin 
Wade (the chairman of the Congressional committee on the 
conduct of the war), issued a pompous proclamation, reflect- 
ing on the valor of the Army of the Potomac, and beginning: 
^'I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen 
the backs of our enemies, from an army whose business it has 
been to seek the adversary and beat him when found. ... It 
is my purpose to do so, and that speedily." It proved, however, 
not to be his own program that Pope was so bravely announcing, 
but Stonewall Jackson's. That wizard of strategy devised 
with General Lee and successfully executed ^'a plan perhaps the 
most daring in the history of warfare." Early in the morning 
of August 25 Jackson took 25,000 men (about half the army 
of Lee before Richmond) with three days' provisions in their 
haversacks and no train except the necessary ambulances and 
munitions wagons, and started northwestward for a destina- 
tion which not even his officers knew. ^^If silence is golden," 
said one of them, ^^then Jackson is a bonanza." Covering fifty- 
six miles in two days, he dashed through the Blue Ridge at 
Thoroughfare Gap and put his force thirteen miles to the rear 
of Pope's army, severing the Federal connections with Wash- 
ington. He surprised Pope's supply trains at Manassas Junction 
and after appropriating all the bacon, beef, pork, and flour that 
his army could use set fire to the rest. By mysterious marches 
and countermarches he baffled the Union commanders until a 
confusion of orders resulted in the Federal camp, and the re- 



570 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



enforcements which were coming to Pope from the Army of the 
Potomac were deflected. At the appointed time Longstreet 
brought up the rest of the Confederate army through the gap 
in the mountains which Pope had inexcusably left unguarded, 
and the two Southern generals united their armies in the very 
face of their foe. The battle which followed on the old field 
of Bull Run, August 29 and 30, saw the Federal forces, though 
superior in numbers, completely outgeneraled, defeated, and 
driven back in rout to the protection of the fortifications of 
Washington. Pope was relieved of his command, and the Army 
of Virginia was absorbed into the Army of the Potomac, under 
its old leader McClellan.^ 

This summer of disaster to the Federal arms in Virginia 
wiped out the joy over the victories of Grant and Farragut 
in the spring. A strong tide of reaction set in against Lincoln's 
government. The hundreds of thousands of men and the mil- 
lions of dollars which had been so generously furnished to 
preserve the Union seemed to have been wasted. Men were 
beginning to declare openly that the defeat of the South was im- 
possible. Political strife revived. The Democrats who had sup- 
ported Lincoln in 1861 deserted the administration in 1862. 
The cabinet threatened to dissolve in faction. The President 
was harassed on every side : distressed by the military failures, 

1 Although Pope was incapable of dealing with such genius as Lee's and 
Jackson's, it must be said that he worked under severe handicaps. His superior, 
Halleck, — fussy, irritable, incompetent, and conceited, — attempted to direct the 
campaign by telegraph from his office chair in Washington. Furthermore, Pope's 
officers and men, alienated by his proclamation, never gave him that hearty 
confidence which made the morale of the Confederates under their adored com- 
manders Lee, Jackson, Longstreet, and the Hills so perfect. It was even be- 
lieved that the officers of the Army of the Potomac were half willing to see 
Pope fail. Porter, one of McClellan's corps commanders, was court-martialed 
for not obeying an order of Pope's, and the case for his rehabilitation dragged 
on till the summer of 1886. He had written just before the battle: "I believe 
the enemy have a contempt for the Army of Virginia. I wish myself away from 
it with all our old Army of the Potomac, and so do our companions." It is 
said that the soldiers of General Franklin (another of McClellan's officers) 
taunted Pope's troops as they fled from the field, "jeered at the new route to 
Richmond," and made no secret of their glee at the downfall of McClellan's 
rival" (Rhodes, Vol. IV, p. 135). 



THE CIVIL WAR 



scolded by Greeley for not emancipating the slaves, scored for 
his ^Mespotism" in suspending the writ of Habeas Corpus and 
inflicting military punishments on civilians. On the other side 
of Mason and Dixon's line hope was high. It was ^'the one brief 
space in Confederate history that was pure sunshine." The 
Southern agents in Europe were confident that England and 
France were on the point of interceding in their behalf. Pres- 
ident Davis felt that the moment had come to launch the 
movement which should drive the Federal armies out of the 
Southland and establish the independence of the Confederacy. 
A great triple offensive was planned. Lee's victorious army was 
to invade Maryland, delivering the sister state" of the South 
from Federal domination, threatening the Northern capital, and 
encouraging the defeat of the administration in the autumn 
elections. Braxton Bragg, who had succeeded Beauregard, was 
to expel the Union army from Kentucky. And Van Dorn was 
to clear the troops of Rosecrans and Grant out of Mississippi 
and Tennessee and regain control of the great river. Before the 
autumn frosts tinged the maples the triple plan was defeated 
at every point, and the Confederates were thrown back on the 
defensive. 

Lee crossed the Potomac on September 4, publishing a procla- 
mation that he had come to the aid of the oppressed people of 
Maryland in throwing off their foreign yoke." His army was 
neither large nor well supplied, but he counted on the sympathy 
of the inhabitants to smooth his way. With the same contempt 
for McClellan's strategy as he had shown for Pope's, he divided 
his army in the face of his enemy, sending Jackson to take 
Harpers Ferry from its 12,000 defenders while he himself pro- 
ceeded to Sharpsburg on Antietam Creek. When McClellan's 
army was passing through Frederick City on Lee's heels a pri- 
vate from an Indiana regiment had the rare luck to pick up a 
dispatch from Lee to D. H. Hill, revealing the whole plan of the 
Confederate advance. With this information in his possession 
and with his great superiority in numbers, McClellan might have 
destroyed the armies of Lee and Jackson in quick succession; 
but he let the favorable moment slip by, as usual, and before he 



572 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



was ready to attack, Jackson had completed his work and re- 
joined Lee. Even then McClellan had 87,000 men to oppose to 
Lee's 55,000 when the armies joined in the terrific battle of 
Sharpsburg, or Antietam, on September 1 7. All day ^Hhe battle 
line swayed back and forth like a rope in adverse currents," 
and at nightfall Lee still held his ground. The next morning, 
yielding to the advice of his generals and convinced that he had 
nothing to hope from the people of Maryland, he withdrew his 
forces unmolested to the southern side of the Potomac. Tech- 
nically Sharpsburg was a victory for McClellan, and he con- 
gratulated himself on it as ^'a masterpiece of art." But in 
reality he had lost the opportunity to destroy Lee's Army of 
Virginia. His tactics were wretched. Instead of directing the 
battle himself, he left it largely to his corps commanders, with 
the result of a succession of unrelated attacks. Obsessed by 
his persistent bogy of the preponderance of the Confederate 
forces, he held nearly one third of his magnificent army in re- 
serve during the entire battle. To be sure, the immediate object 
of the battle had been gained by McClellan : Lee's invasion of 
the North had been checked.^ But the discouraging fact re- 
mained that Lee had led back his army intact (except for the 
11,000 who fell on the field of battle) to the Virginia side of the 
Potomac. After six weeks of further procrastination McClellan 
was removed from command (November 5), and General Am- 
brose E. Burnside was appointed in his place.^ 

iThis fortunate event gave Lincoln the opportunity for publishing his long- 
contemplated Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in the states or 
parts of states still in rebellion against the Federal government (September 22). 

2 Burnside was a brave soldier and a gallant officer, but he lacked the gifts 
of field marshal. He knew that he was unequal to the command of the great 
Army of the Potomac, and he had twice refused the offer of it before he 
received the order which he felt he had no right to disobey. Substituting reck- 
lessness for McClellan's overcaution, he delivered a frontal attack on the Con- 
federates' magnificently fortified position on the heights above Fredericksburg 
on the Rappahannock (December 13) and was repulsed with fearful loss. He 
sent his men to certain death like sheep to the slaughter, persisting in the charge 
against the advice of his best corps commanders. In January he was relieved 
of his command, but he never could be relieved of the memory of "those men 
over there," who had marched against a wall of fire at his rash command. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



573 



At the moment Lee crossed the Potomac into Maryland, 
Confederate armies under Kirby Smith and Braxton Bragg 
were moving northward into Kentucky. Smith, capturing Lex- 
ington and marching to within four miles of the Ohio, threw 
the city of Cincinnati into a panic. Bragg, following a few days 
later from eastern Tennessee, entered Kentucky, as Lee had 
entered Maryland, with a proclamation offering the inhabitants 
the opportunity to shake off the yoke of ^'the Abolitionist ty- 
rant" and ^'be restored to the freedom inherited from their 
fathers." He took 20,000 stands of arms for recruits, but the 
Kentuckians did not flock to his banners. Buell meantime had 
moved south to accomplish Lincoln's pet plan of succoring the 
Unionists in eastern Tennessee and capturing Chattanooga if 
possible. Bragg had a clear way open to Louisville^ and had he 
moved with decision and speed he might have taken the poorly 
defended city. But, discouraged by the hostile attitude of the 
Kentuckians, he paused and turned aside, allowing Buell to 
beat him in the race to Louisville. Strengthening the fortifica- 
tions of the city and gathering reenforcements, Buell turned 
south again, in pursuit of Bragg. The armies met on October 8 
at Perryville. After a sharp engagement Bragg retired toward 
the Tennessee border. 

Buell, like McClellan, was slow and overcautious on the 
offensive. Political influence had long been working against 
him, and late in October he was replaced by Rosecrans. For 
more than two months Bragg and Rosecrans lay facing each 
other in Tennessee, while the bold Confederate raiders Morgan, 
Forrest, and Joe Wheeler wrought much damage on railroads, 
bridges, and supply depots. Finally, on the day after Christmas, 
when the North was plunged in gloom over Burnside's terrible 
defeat at Fredericksburg, Rosecrans moved from his quarters at 
Nashville to attack the Confederates encamped near Murfrees- 
boro. The armies on both sides were fairly matched and the 
losses heavy. On the night of January 2, 1863, Bragg re- 
treated from Murfreesboro, and President Lincoln telegraphed 
to Rosecrans, ^^God bless you! " Neither Perryville nor Mur- 
freesboro could fairly be called a Union victory on the field, yet, 



574 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



like McClellan's more brilliant action at Sharpsburg, they ac- 
complished the main purpose of frustrating the Confederate 
advance. Bragg was thrown back on Chattanooga, in the ex- 
treme southeastern corner of Tennessee, and, except for Hood's 
desperate dash on Nashville two years later, the Confederates 
made no further attempt to win the two great states of the 
Middle West south of the Ohio.^ 

The new year brought little comfort to either side. The 
failure of their triple advance was perhaps the least of the 
South's misfortunes. The blockade was beginning to produce 
the misery which was to grow more and more acute during the 
last two years of the war. Rations were reduced. Shoes, blankets, 
and medicines were lacking. The transportation system broke 
down, because supplies for the maintenance of the railroads 
were not available. A Conscription Act of April, 1862, which 
had called to the colors all the white men between the ages of 
eighteen and thirty-five, was bitterly resisted. Papers like the 
Charleston Mercury and the Richmond Examiner attacked 
Jefferson Davis as incompetent and despotic. The old states 
of the seaboard, where the doctrine of states' rights was strong, 
arrayed themselves against ^'the violations of constitutional 
law by the supreme government." North Carolina demanded 
the return of her volunteers for the defense of the state, like the 
New England governments in the War of 1812. The conven- 
tion in South Carolina proposed to forbid the Confederate 
government to raise troops in the state except by voluntary en- 
listment. Governor Brown of Georgia defied President Davis, 
as Governor Troup had defied President Adams thirty-six years 
before. The Confederate legislature demanded the dismissal 
of the Secretary of War, Judah P. Benjamin. And, finally, the 
high hopes of the South for British and French intervention 
began to wane with the publication of the Emancipation Procla- 
mation and the failure of the Confederate arms in Maryland 
and Kentucky. 

^The third part of the general Confederate offensive in the autumn of 1862 
was foiled when Generals Price and Van Dorn, in a spirited two days' battle 
(October 3 and 4), failed to dislodge General Rosecrans from Corinth, Mississippi. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



575 



At the North despondency was profound. The almost un- 
relieved misfortune of the Union army in Virginia, culminating 
in the awful disaster of Fredericksburg, had strengthened the 
belief of thousands of men from Maine to Minnesota that it 
was impossible to subdue the South. The ^^Copperheads" came 
to the fore with their demands for the immediate cessation of 
the war. Their leader, Vallandigham of Ohio, harangued the 
House of Representatives : You have not conquered the South ; 
you never will. The war for the Union is in your hands a most 
bloody and costly failure. . . . Money you have expended with- 
out limit, and blood poured out like water. . . . Defeat, debt, 
taxation, and sepulchres — these are your only trophies." Gov- 
ernor Morton of Indiana telegraphed to Secretary Stanton that 
the legislatures of Indiana and Illinois contemplated passing a 
"joint resolution acknowledging the Southern Confederacy and 
urging the states of the Northwest to dissolve all constitutional 
relations with the New England states." "By a common in- 
stinct," wrote Joseph Medill of Chicago, "everybody feels that 
the war is drawing to a disastrous and disgraceful termination. 
Money cannot be supplied much longer to a beaten, demoralized, 
and homesick army. Sometimes I think that nothing is left now 
but to fight for a boundary." The expenses of the government 
had risen to $2,500,000 a day, of which less than one quarter 
was realized from the customs duties and taxes. The armies of 
Grant and Sherman tried in vain during the spring months 
of 1863 to approach the great stronghold of Vicksburg by the 
treacherous, fever-laden bayous of the Yazoo swamps; while 
"Fighting Joe" Hooker, who had replaced Burnside in the 
command of the Army of the Potomac, was outgeneraled and 
defeated by Lee and Jackson in the Virginia forests about Chan- 
cellorsville (May 2 and 3).^ Volunteering had ceased, and the 
Federal Congress resorted to conscription (March 3, 1863), as 

iJn the deepening twilight after the battle Stonewall Jackson and a few of 
his staff, who had ridden far in advance of the line, were mistaken by Confed- 
erate sharpshooters for a group of Federal cavalry and fired upon. Jackson was 
mortally wounded, and his death was, in the opinion of many men of the South, 
the loss of the war. 



576 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the Confederate Congress had done a year earher. This Con- 
scription Act and an act of the same day authorizing President 
Lincoln to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus wherever he saw 
fit provoked redoubled criticism of the laboring administration. 
While the draft was resisted desertions multiplied. Civilian 
clothing was smuggled into the lines of the Army of the Potomac 
by the carloads to encourage the slackers to leave the ranks. 

The turning-point of the war came in the opening days of 
July, 1863, with the repulse of Lee's second invasion of the 
North at Gettysburg and with the fall of the Confederate strong- 
hold of Vicksburg. Many considerations urged Lee to cross the 
Potomac again to fight on Union soil. The morale of his army 
of 75,000 men was at its peak. After the victories of Freder- 
icksburg and Chancellorsville the Army of Virginia felt itself 
to be invincible. Furthermore, Lee, who was a close student of 
public opinion in the North, believed that the moment was 
opportune to encourage the Copperheads in their resistance to 
Lincoln's government. What possibilities there were in a vic- 
tory on Northern soil ! It would throw panic into the capital 
and the great commercial cities of the seaboard, close the vaults 
of the New York bankers to Secretary Chase's appeal for funds,^ 
divert Grant and Sherman from the siege of Vicksburg, bring 
the peace party to the fore in the North, and end the war by a 
single blow, with the acknowledgment of the independence of 
the South. 

As Lee's magnificent columns, under Longstreet, A. P. Hill, 
and Ewell (Jackson's successor), moved from Fredericksburg 
toward the Shenandoah Valley, Hooker followed on interior 
lines," keeping to the east of the Blue Ridge. Ewell pressed 
ahead rapidly until by the end of June his cavalry were within 
three or four miles of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and his artil- 
lery shook the buildings of the town. From Pittsburgh to 
Philadelphia terrifying rumors spread that Lee with 250 guns 
was shelling Harrisburg — that he was marching on Philadelphia 
with 100,000 men. Lincoln called out the militia from Ohio, 

1 Chase had just inaugurated the system of national banks, which we shall 
study in the next section. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



577 



Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland. The Democratic 
Governor Seymour of New York, who was accused of Copper- 
headism, offered his support to the limit. Meanwhile the im- 
perious Hooker, quarreling with Halleck about the disposition 
of the garrison at Harpers Ferry, had offered his resignation in 
a moment of irritation and had been replaced (June 27) by 
General George G. Meade, a modesty tireless worker and a fine 
disciplinarian, whose lack of brilliancy was atoned for by a devo- 
tion to the cause which, as Grant remarked to Stanton, ^Vould 
have led him to resign his general's commission if ordered, and 
fall into the ranks without a murmur." 

Meade's rapid advance into Pennsylvania caused Lee to re- 
call Ewell from Harrisburg and concentrate his whole force near 
the little town of Gettysburg. On July i the armies came into 
contact, the Confederates defeating the Union left, commanded 
by the gallant Reynolds, who was killed on the field. Meade 
sent forward Hancock to take his place, and the line was re- 
stored. The second day's fighting consisted of a number of 
desperate but not well-coordinated attacks of the Confederates 
on both wings. The Unionists had a double advantage : They 
were being reenforced hourly, until by the afternoon they had 
some 90,000 men to oppose to Lee's 70,000. Moreover, the Fed- 
eral position on Cemetery Ridge was a convex formation, which 
allowed easier transfer of troops behind the lines than did the 
concave front of Seminary Ridge, occupied by the Confederates. 
On the third day of the battle (July 3) Lee decided to attack 
the Union center. In vain Longstreet remonstrated with his 
chief against sending the men to certain death — infantry against 
batteries, ^'over nearly a mile of open ground under the rain of 
canister and shrapnel." ^'The enemy is there. General Long- 
street, and I am going to strike him," was Lee's quiet answer. 
General Pickett's division of 15,000 Virginians, the flower of the 
Confederate army, was selected for the attack. About three 
o'clock in the afternoon^ "with banners flying and with the 
steadiness of a dress parade," the magnificent columns swept 
down the slopes of Seminary Ridge into the valley. When they 
had crossed half the fourteen hundred yards that separated the 



578 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



battle lines, the heavy Union artillery opened fire on them, mow- 
ing great gaps in their ranks. On they went unfaltering, until 
their thinning columns came within range of Hancock's shel- 
tered infantry. Still on and up the hill they went, against a 
wall of flame. A hundred men with the gallant Armistead 
scaled the Union fortifications and, driving the gunners from 
their posts, planted the Confederate colors within their lines — 
the high-water mark of the Confederacy. But the ordeal was 
greater than flesh and blood could bear. The attacking line 
halted, bent slowly backward, then broke and fled — what there 
was left of it — through the valley of death to the shelter of its 
own guns.^ 

Like a gambler, Lee had staked all on a desperate throw — 
and lost. With unfailing magnanimity he took all the blame 
on himself and had no words but praise for his officers and 
men. On the night of the Fourth of July he began his retreat 
to the Potomac through a dismal rain. The river, swollen by 
floods, held him on the Maryland side for several days, during 
which he was apprehensive of an attack by the victorious Union 
army. Meade himself favored and planned such an attack, 
but was dissuaded by the advice of five of his six corps comman- 
ders. Lincoln was greatly distressed when he learned that Lee 
had crossed the Potomac into Virginia. ^^We had them within 
our grasp," he said. ^^We had only to stretch forth our hands 
and they were ours." But the case was not so simple. The 
Union army had been severely handled in the three days' fight- 
ing. Reynolds was killed. Hancock was severely wounded. 
The army needed rest, recuperation, and reorganization. Be- 

^The Federal losses were 23,049, the Confederate 28,063. Lee's fame is so 
deservedly dear to his fellow countrymen that they 'have often shrunk from 
criticizing his military tactics too severely. But to his contemporaries, and even 
to his associates, he was not always inspired. Longstreet called him ''perfect in 
defensive warfare but over-rash in attack." He was certainly at fault in the third 
day's fighting at Gettysburg, as he had been in the frontal attack on McClellan 
at Malvern Hill. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., a cavalry colonel in the Union 
army and a keen military critic, gives a very unfavorable opinion of Lee's gen- 
eralship, in "A Cycle of Adams Letters" (W. C. Ford, Ed.), Vol. H, pp. 56, 57. 
After Gettysburg Lee offered his resignation, but Davis refused to accept it. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



579 



sides, Lee, always masterly on the defensive, had chosen and 
fortified his position well on the banks of the Potomac. 

The retreat of the rain-soaked Confederates from Gettys- 
burg would have been more dismal still had they known that on 
the same Fourth of July General Pemberton had surrendered 
his garrison of 29,500 men at Vicksburg, together with 170 
cannon and 50,000 small arms. For the details of the wonderful 
campaign of eight months against the Mississippi stronghold 
the student must read the memoirs of the two great Union 
commanders, Grant and Sherman. Baffled in his attempt to 
approach the impregnable defenses of Vicksburg from the north 
and east in the late autumn of 1862, Grant shifted his opera- 
tions to the west of the Mississippi, where the network of 
bayous, swollen by winter rains, made a series of submerged 
islands and peninsulas with the tortuous course of the river. 
Floundering through the swamps, swarming like waterfowl to 
the patches of dry land for their huddled camps, battling with 
malaria and pests, the army slowly gained the shore of the river 
below Vicksburg, while Admiral Porter ran his gunboats past 
the batteries of the fortress and towed barges laden with sup- 
plies. On April 30 Grant got his troops across to the eastern 
bank of the river at Bruinsburg, about thirty-five miles south 
of Vicksburg, and telegraphed Halleck that he felt that the 
battle was ^^more than half won." Cutting loose from his base 
on the river and living off the country. Grant moved northward 
toward the state capital of Jackson, where Johnston was arriv- 
ing with 15,000 reenforcements for Pemberton from the Army 
of Virginia. 

Driving Johnston out of Jackson, and destroying the arsenals 
and military stores in the city, Grant turned westward to close 
in upon Pemberton. The Confederates made a valiant stand 
against superior numbers at Champion's Hill and the Big Black 
River, but were forced back to the defenses of Vicksburg, where 
the Union army held them closely besieged in a line of twenty- 
five miles extending from Haines's Bluff to Warrenton. In the 
eighteen days since he had ferried his troops across the Missis- 
sippi at Bruinsburg, Grant had marched one hundred and eighty 



58o THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



miles through a hostile and difficult country, fighting the enemy 
at every step. He had captured the state capital, dispersed 
Pemberton's reenforcements, seized the Vicksburg and Jackson 
railroad, secured the river approaches to Vicksburg from north 
and south, and shut in an army of 40,000 men behind the 
frowning ramparts. For six weeks the beleaguered city held 
out, until the inhabitants were reduced to eating mules and 
rats. To avoid the shells from Grant's batteries on the land and 
Porter's gunboats on the river, many of the families took refuge 
in underground chambers hewn in the hard clay of the bluffs. 
When all hope of relief from Johnston was gone and his soldiers 
were staggering in the trenches from starvation, Pemberton 
surrendered. 

The capture of Vicksburg was by far the most momentous 
event of the war. It meant the opening of the great river to 
the commerce of the whole Mississippi Basin.^ It meant the 
severance of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas from their sister 
states of the Confederacy. But chief of all, it meant the stop- 
page of the most important source of supplies for the Southern 
armies. For not only had large quantities of grain and beef 
come eastward from Texas over the bridge" of the Mississippi 
between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, but with the constantly 
tightening blockade of their own shores on the Atlantic and 
the Gulf, the Confederates had found it convenient to get 
arms, munitions, medicine, and other articles from Europe via 
the Mexican ports, whence they had been smuggled across the 
boundary into Texas and so over the famous ^'bridge." The 
blockade was the first step, and the recovery of the Mississippi 
the second, in that process of starving out the South which 
counted for more than the victories on the battlefield in the 
final collapse of the Confederacy. 

iPort Hudson, Louisiana, a smaller river stronghold about one hundred and 
twenty-five miles below Vicksburg, was besieged by the Union general Banks. 
When its commander. General Gardner, heard of the fall of Vicksburg, he sur- 
rendered his garrison of 5000 men, July 9. Just one week later the steamer 
Imperial, from St. Louis, anchored with a cargo of merchandise at New Orleans. 
Lincoln wrote in August to a mass meeting in his home town of Springfield, 
Illinois, " The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." 



THE CIVIL WAR 



581 



"Gettysburg and Vicksburg ought to have ended the war/' 
says Rhodes (Vol. IV, p. 319). There was plenty of fight left in 
the Southern armies, to be sure, but it was henceforth a fight of 
desperation — the spirit of ^Hhe last ditch." President Davis 
kept to the last his nervous confidence in the favorable outcome 
of the struggle, and the Southern press, minimizing the impor- 
tance of Vicksburg and calling Gettysburg ^'a drawn battle," 
insisted with redoubled assurance on the eventual victory of the 
Confederacy. The generals in the field knew better. ^^Dick" 
Taylor, one of the best of them, declared that after the cam- 
paign of 1864 opened ^'the commanders . . . fought simply to 
afford statesmanship an opportunity to mitigate the sorrows of 
inevitable defeat," and George Gary Eggleston, in "A Rebel's 
Recollections," said, ^'We all knew from the beginning of 1864 
that the war was hopeless." Confederate bonds, which had 
been bought in large quantities in England and France, sank to 
one fifth of their par value. The tone of the British press and 
of most of the influential men in Parliament, which had been 
favorable to the South, began to change.^ Napoleon III de- 
sisted from his efforts to bring about a recognition of the inde- 
pendence of the Confederacy with British cooperation.^ The 
hearty response of the North to calls for money and men, and 
the indorsement of the administration in the elections of the 
autumn of 1863, showed that the two great victories had done 
much to dispel the discouragement and disaffection of the second 
year of the war.^ 

iSee the exultant letter written by Henry Adams from London to his brother 
Charles Francis, Jr., on the news of the victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg 
(July 23) in "A Cycle of Adams Letters" (W. C. Ford, Ed.), Vol. II, pp. 58 f. 

2As early as March, 1861, Mercier, the French minister at Washington, had 
advised Napoleon to recognize the Confederacy. Two weeks before the battle 
of Gettysburg, Slidell, the special Confederate envoy to France, interviewed the 
emperor, who sanctioned contracts for building cruisers for the Southern cause 
at Bordeaux and Nantes. ^'You may build the ships," said Napoleon, "but it 
will be needful to conceal their destination " (Schouler, Vol. VI, p. 434). 

2 An interesting feature of the rejoicing over the victories was Lincoln's proc- 
lamation of a day of national thanksgiving, borrowed from the old New England 
festival of the Puritans. The precedent has been followed every year since 1863 
by our presidents. 



S82 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Before the dose of 1863 another major campaign resulted 
in the capture of a Confederate position second in importance 
only to Vicksburg. For six months after his New Year's battle 
at Murfreesboro, Rosecrans had idly confronted Bragg in cen- 
tral Tennessee. Finally, heeding the repeated exhortations of 
Halleck, he took the field late in June and by skillful strategy 
compelled Bragg to withdraw across the Cumberland Mountains 
and the Tennessee River into the northwest corner of Georgia. 
Rosecrans then occupied the town of Chattanooga on the 
southern bank of the Tennessee. But here his strategy ceased. 
Mistaking Bragg's concentration in the Chickamauga valley 
for a further retreat into Georgia, Rosecrans followed with 
hasty and imperfect formations, neglecting to secure the im- 
portant heights of Lookout and Missionary Ridge on the south 
side of the river. He met a furious attack of Bragg's army on 
Chickamauga Creek, which broke his right and center, chasing 
men and officers (including Rosecrans himself) back twelve 
miles to the defenses of Chattanooga. Only Thomas, ^'the Rock 
of Chickamauga," stood firm on the left wing through the 
afternoon till nightfall, with his forces formed in a horseshoe, 
bearing the repeated onsets of Bragg's whole line (September 
20) and retiring at last in good order to join his routed com- 
rades. Bragg fortified the ridges skillfully and held Rosecrans^s 
army closely invested in Chattanooga, with only a single inade- 
quate and harassed road over the hills to the northward for 
his supplies. Rations fell low, and horses and mules died of 
hunger by the thousands. 

Rosecrans was saved from Pemberton's fate in Vicksburg 
by the prompt action of the administration. At Secretary 
Stanton's urgent request 16,000 troops under Hooker were de- 
tached from the Army of the Potomac and sent by rail via Wash- 
ington, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Nashville, reaching the 
Tennessee River some forty miles below Chattanooga in eight 
days.^ Reenforcements for Rosecrans were sent also from 
Grant's Vicksburg army, by way of Memphis, but as the river 

^This exploit is one of the most conspicuous examples of the advantage 
which the North enjoyed during the war in its efficient railroad system. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



583 



was low and the Confederate cavalry raiders had made havoc 
with roads and bridges, these troops under Sherman did not 
reach Chattanooga until the middle of November. Meanwhile 
an important change in command had been effected. Grant, 
promoted to a major-generalcy in the regular army as a reward 
for his services at Vicksburg, was met in person by Secretary 
Stanton at Indianapolis and put in charge of all the armies 
between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi north of Banks's 
department of the Gulf States. He immediately replaced Rose- 
crans by the reliable Thomas, to whom he telegraphed to hold 
Chattanooga at all hazards till help should arrive. Thomas, with 
characteristic energy and with the invaluable engineering aid 
of General W. F. Smith, set about to secure lines of communica- 
tion down the river. When Grant arrived at Chattanooga on 
October 23, "wet, dirty, and well," he found the morale of the 
troops improved and hope revived. 

In another month, with Sherman's reenforcements at hand. 
Grant was able to begin the brilliant operations which drove 
Bragg's army from its strong positions on the heights south of 
the town. No more wonderful exploits in arms have been per- 
formed on our soil than the assaults of the three days (Novem- 
ber 23-25) known as the battle of Chattanooga, where soldiers 
from the armies of the Potomac, the Cumberland, and the ]\Iis- 
sissippi cooperated under the command of the four greatest 
Union generals of the war — Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and 
Thomas. On the first day Thomas's troops drove the Con- 
federates from their first lines^ and at midnight Sherman set 
5000 men across the river. The next day Hooker led his sol- 
diers up the slope of Lookout Mountain through rain and mist, 
fought the famous "battle above the clouds," and planted the 
Stars and Stripes on the topmost peak. But the greatest feat 
of all was reserved for Thomas's Cumberland troops on the 
third day. Ordered to take the Confederate rifle pits at the base 
of Missionary Ridge, they refused to pause after the work was 
done, but stormed up the broken, crumbling face of the ridge 
in an uncontrollable dash, led by the impetuous Sheridan, driv- 
ing the enemy from his second Hne and continuing up the rough 



584 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



steeps, "oblivious of the bristling rifle pits on the crest and the 
30 cannon enfilading every gully." Reaching the top, they 
drove the astonished gunners and riflemen before them and sent 
Bragg down the eastern slope of the ridge in full retreat, burn- 
ing his stores and bridges behind him. The victory of Chat- 
tanooga made Tennessee secure for the Union ^ and left the 
North only the task of subduing the old states of the southern 
Atlantic seaboard. The news of the great victory reached the 
Northern cities on the first national Thanksgiving Day. 

From the close of the year 1863 the nature of the war was 
changed. It ceased to be a contest on anything approaching 
equal terms. The enormous resources of the North in men and 
money were placed ungrudgingly at the disposal of the govern- 
ment. Thanks to Secretary Chase's skillful financial manage- 
ment Lincoln could speak in his message of December, 1863, 
of ^Hhe prompt and full satisfaction of all demands on the 
Treasury.'' In the summer of 1863 the draft had been resisted 
at many points in the North, with a terrible riot in New York 
City costing 1500 lives. The war had been called a failure and 
Lincoln branded as a tyrant."^ But in 1864, drafts in March, 
July, and December for an aggregate of more than 1,000,000 
men were quietly and quickly met. By sheer weight of numbers 
Grant and Sherman bore down on the diminishing armies of 

iThe protection of the inhabitants of the mountain regions of eastern Ten- 
nessee was always a matter of solicitude to Lincoln, but it was not till the 
summer of 1863 that the military situation allowed an army of relief to be sent 
to them. General Burnside occupied Knoxville while Rosecrans was forcing Bragg 
out of Tennessee. After his victory at Chickamauga, Bragg sent Longstreet to 
drive Burnside out of Knoxville, but the Federal victory at Chattanooga made 
Longstreet's position in the interior of the state untenable. 

2 Richard H. Dana wrote to Charles Francis Adams on March 9, 1863: "As 
to the politics of Washington, the most striking thing is the absence of personal 
loyalty to the President. ... He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, 
none to bet on his head. If a Republican convention were to be held tomorrow, 
he would not get the vote of a state. He does not act, or talk, or feel like the 
ruler of a great empire in a great crisis. ... He is an unutterable calamity to 
us where he is. Only the army can save us. Congress is not a council of state. 
It is a mere district representation of men of district reputations" (C. F. Adams, 
Jr., "Richard Henry Dana," Vol. II, p. 264). 




The War in Eastern Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania 



586 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

Lee and Johnston in the seaboard states of the South, slowly 
crushing their power of resistance. If there were still spasmodic 
offensives on the part of the South, like Morgan's cavalry raid 
into Ohio or Early's dashes down the Shenandoah Valley or 
Hood's desperate rush on Nashville, they were only the sudden 
flame that shoots from a dying fire. Never after Chattanooga 
did the Southern armies advance as they had advanced at Shiloh 
and the second Bull Run, at Sharpsburg, Murfreesboro, and 
Gettysburg, to achieve the victory that should seal the inde- 
pendence of the Confederacy. 

General Sherman wrote in 1885 that it ^'was not till after 
both Gettysburg and Vicksburg that the war professionally 
began." By which he meant that only then did the seasoned 
Union soldiers, scientifically brigaded and under a unified com- 
mand, move steadily toward a preconcerted goal. Congress, 
on the last day of February, 1864, revived the grade of lieu- 
tenant general, conferred only twice since Washington's day, 
and Lincoln immediately appointed Grant to this lofty honor, 
which carried with it the command, under the president, of all 
the armies of the United States. Sherman took Grant's place 
as leader of the combined armies of the West. The plan of 
campaign for 1864 was simple. Grant made his headquarters 
with the Army of the Potomac, of which he left Meade in 
nominal command. He was ready on the third of May to cross 
the Rapidan and begin his advance against Lee's army and 
Richmond. At the same moment Sherman, with the combined 
armies of the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland, com- 
manded by Schofield, McPherson, and Thomas respectively, 
moved from Chattanooga into Georgia, where Joseph E. John- 
ston had succeeded to Bragg's command. Both Grant and 
Sherman outnumbered their opponents about two to one; but 
both needed decided advantage in men, for Grant was moving 
in an unfamiliar region against an adversary who knew every 
foot of the land he was defending, and Sherman had to protect 
at every point an ever-lengthening line of railroad for his sup- 
plies. We need not trace in detail the summer's campaign of 
these two great armies as they gradually closed in on the Con- 



THE CIVIL WAR 



587 



federacy from the north and west. For a month Grant ham- 
mered his way toward Richmond, sacrificing tens of thousands 
of men in the battle of the Wilderness (the scene of Hooker's 
defeat just a year before), at the ^'bloody angle" of Spottsyl- 
vania, and in the reckless frontal assault on Lee's strongly for- 
tified position at Cold Harbor. ^'I intend to fight it out on this 
line if it takes all summer," he telegraphed to Halleck after the 
Wilderness fight. But his terrible losses^ led him to change his 
plan. Avoiding the strong defenses of Richmond, he trans- 
ferred his army to the James, twenty miles below the city, and 
laid siege to the important railroad junction of Petersburg. An 
unsuccessful attempt to enter Petersburg through a breach in 
the fortifications (the famous ^'crater") made by the explosion 
of a huge mine, on July 30, was the last active offensive of the 
Army of the Potomac for the year. 

This costly and ineffective campaign of the new lieutenant 
general, from whom rapid success was expected, brought mourn- 
ing to thousands of homes and discouragement to millions of 
hearts. July and August were months of almost unrelieved 
gloom in the North.^ General Jubal A. Early, operating against 
inferior Union commanders in the Shenandoah Valley, crossed 
the Potomac and appeared before the defenses of Washington 
on July II. The city was barely saved by a detachment from 
the Army of the Potomac. Sherman was slowly advancing in 
Georgia, to be sure, but not without severe checks too, like that 
at Kenesaw Mountain, where on June 27 he sacrificed 3000 
men in an attack on Johnston's trenches. Admiral Farragut's 
capture of the forts in Mobile Bay (the first note of cheer in 
the gloomy summer) did not come till the twenty- third of 
August. Meanwhile it looked as if the administration might go 

1 Grant's losses from May 4 to June 12 were 54,929, a number approximately 
equal to Lee's whole force at the opening of the campaign. In the assault at Cold 
Harbor, hardly less reckless than Burnside's at Fredericksburg, Grant lost 7000, 
with no compensating advantage gained, as he later confessed in his ''Memoirs." 

2 A resolution passed Congress on July 2, 1864, asking Lincoln to appoint a 
day for humiliation and prayer, to implore the Almighty "as the supreme ruler 
of the world not to destroy us as a people." 



588 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



down to defeat in the presidential election under the weight of 
military failure. Lincoln himself thought it ^'extremely prob- 
able" that he would not be reelected and on the very day of 
Farragut's victory at Mobile wrote down his apprehensions in 
a secret memorandum. The Democratic convention, which met 
August 29 at Chicago, nominated General !McClellan for presi- 
dent and adopted a platform_ containing a plank (written by* 
Vallandigham) to the effect that after four years of failure to 
restore the Union by the experiment of war . . . justice, hu- 
manity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate 
efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities."^ 

The autumn brought brighter hopes for the administration. 
On September i Sherman entered Atlanta. On October 19 
Sheridan, by his dashing ride from Winchester, ^'twenty miles 
away," turned the defeat of Cedar Creek into a magnificent 
victory and drove the cavalry of Early out of the Shenandoah 
Valley. In the election which followed in November, Lincoln 
carried every state except New Jersey, Delaware, and Ken- 
tucky, although McCIellan's minorities were large. The vote 
in the electoral college was 212 to 21, but the popular vote gave 
Lincoln less than 400,000 plurality in a total of 4,000,000. 

Before the year was out two more tidings of victory came from 
the Union generals in the South. Sherman, cutting loose from 
his base and sending Thomas back to defend Nashville, marched 
through the rich fields of Georgia from Atlanta to the sea, with 
60,000 men in four columns, living off the country and destroy- 
ing railroads and public buildings in a wide swath of sixty miles.^ 

^It is only fair to McClellan to say that he repudiated this plank, while 
accepting the nomination of the party which was to "hurl the tyrant Lincoln 
from his throne." McClellan said that he could not look his old comrades in 
arms in the face if he indorsed the sentiment that the war was a failure. 

2 There has been much controversy over the conduct of the troops, and 
Sherman has been execrated as a vandal for the damage wrought on this famous 
march. Sherman was harsh in his determination that the South should feel the 
ravages of war. He wrote to Grant that he would "make Georgia howl." Yet 
he and all his officers asserted that no wanton damage was done by official 
orders. As a matter of fact, discipline was not strictly enforced, and camp fol- 
lowers, "bummers," and negroes undoubtedly committed acts of wanton de- 
struction and pillage. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



589 



On the night of December 20 General Hardee got his garrison of 
15,000 men out of Savannah into South Carohna by a pontoon 
bridge across the river, and Sherman took possession of the city, 
with 1 50 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 
25,000 bales of cotton, which he presented to Lincoln as a 
Christmas gift. Meantime General Hood, who had replaced 
Johnston when Sherman was approaching Atlanta, left Georgia 
to take care of itself as best it could and struck across the 
Tennessee River to crush Thomas. If he succeeded it would 
mean the undoing of Chattanooga, the reoccupation of Tennes- 
see, and the opportunity for Hood with his victorious army to 
move eastward and cooperate with either the Confederate troops 
in the Carolinas or Lee's hard-pressed army near Richmond. 
The anxiety of the men in high position, from Lincoln down 
through Stanton, Grant, and Halleck, was great. Grant repeat- 
edly urged Thomas to attack, and even went so far as to desig- 
nate General Logan to supersede him. But Thomas knew his 
ground and coolly waited until he was ready. On December 1 5 
he completely shattered Hood's force before Nashville. The 
Southern army, which had numbered 53,000 when Johnston had 
faced Sherman, melted away, and Hood was relieved from the 
service at his own request. 

The victories of Sherman and Thomas in December practi- 
cally brought the resistance of the South to an end. The spring 
months of 1865 found Davis and his Congress at odds. The 
destitution of the Confederacy could no longer be concealed. 
Desertions were frequent, food was scarce, Union money was 
circulating in spite of the prohibition of the government, and 
negroes began to be recruited in the armies. Public men, in 
ever-increasing numbers, were convinced that further resistance 
was hopeless. A delegation headed by Alexander H. Stephens 
met Lincoln and Seward at Hampton Roads, February 3, to dis- 
cuss terms for the cessation of hostilities. Lincoln insisted on 
two points: the restoration of the Union and the abolition of 
slavery. The Southerners pronounced his terms ^^unconditional 
submission to the mercy of conquerors," and the conference 
broke up. Davis and Lee both upheld the Southern delegates 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



in their refusal to abandon the independence of the Confed- 
eracy. ^'I can have no common country with the Yankees," 
said Davis. ^^My life is bound up with the Confederacy. If 
any man supposes that under any circumstances I can be an 
agent of the reconstruction of the Union, he mistakes every 
element of my nature. With the Confederacy I will live or 
die." Lee told his soldiers in a proclamation that their choice 
was between "war and abject submission." Yet both these men 
lived to be reconciled to the United States of America, and 
Davis at the close of his history of the Confederacy wrote of 
the Union, "Esto perpetual" The Southern leaders in the 
spring of 1865 utterly misunderstood Lincoln's conciliatory 
spirit. They used such phrases as "abject submission," "sub- 
jugation," "our arrogant foe," when arrogance or revenge was 
as far from Lincoln's thoughts as the east is from the west. 
His beautiful second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 
breathed only magnanimity in his deep longing for a just, 
kindly, and lasting peace for the war-torn country, "with malice 
toward none, with charity for all." 

Yet it is not strange that the deeds of Sherman spoke more 
loudly to the South than the words of Lincoln. The general, 
after a brief stay in the city of Savannah, began his march 
northward through the Carolinas — a march which he calls in 
his "Memoirs" "ten times as important" as his famous march 
through Georgia. Among officers and men there was much 
resentment against South Carolina, as the state responsible for 
the war. Columbia, the state capital, was burned the morn- 
ing the Union troops entered the city (February 19) . Although 
the responsibility for the conflagration has not been fixed to 
this day, and evidence points strongly to its origin in burn- 
ing cotton fired by the townspeople themselves, Sherman was 
charged with the deed as the culmination of his policy of vandal- 
ism. It is in the light of the flames of Columbia that the reply 
of the South to Lincoln's terms of peace must be read. 

Grant renewed active operations against Petersburg late in 
March. His army of 116,000 men gradually closed in upon 
Lee's force of less than half that number. On Sunday, April 2, 



THE CIVIL WAR 



591 



a messenger from Lee brought to President Davis, as he sat at 
worship in St. Paul's church, the warning that Richmond must 
be evacuated. The Confederate government left the city that 
night for Danville, and the next day Union troops entered, 
their bands playing Rally round the Flag, Boys! " Lee tried 
to get his army to the hilly land of western Virginia, where he 
believed that he could maintain a defensive warfare for many 
months to come, but Sheridan's cavalry, spreading out along 
the Appomattox valley, headed him off, defeating his hungry, 
exhausted soldiers at Five Forks and bringing him to the bitter 
decision of surrender. Grant and Lee met at the McLean 
farm at Appomattox Court House, April 9. After a few min- 
utes of friendly conversation recalling their old days of com- 
radeship in the Mexican War, Grant drew up to a table and 
wrote out in a few sentences the liberal terms of surrender. 
All that was asked was that the soldiers should lay down their 
arms and return to their allegiance to the Union. The officers 
were allowed to retain their mounts and side arms, and the 
cavalry and artillerymen, at Lee's request, were permitted to 
keep their own horses, ^'to work their farms," as Grant said 
with his wonderful simplicity. Lee immediately signed the 
terms, with a gracious acknowledgment of their generosity. 

The Army of Virginia had been the mainstay of the Con- 
federacy. With Lee's surrender the submission of the other 
armies was only a matter of days. The surrender of Johnston 
to Sherman at Raleigh, North Carolina (April 26),^ and of 
^^Dick" Taylor's forces east of the Mississippi and Kirby 
Smith's west of the river to Canby (May 4 and 26 respectively) 
brought the end of armed resistance to the authority of the 
United States. Nearly 175,000 Confederate soldiers laid down 
their arms in those spring weeks of 1865 and returned to their 

lOn April i8 Sherman had entered into an agreement with Johnston, secur- 
ing the promise of the surrender of all the Confederate troops to the Rio Grande 
in return for political engagements as to the treatment of the seceded states. 
Sherman transcended his competence as a military commander in discussing 
these political matters, and his arrangements were promptly disavowed by the 
government at Washington. However, his intentions were good, and the harsh 
censure meted out to him by Stanton was unkind if not undeserved. 



592 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



plantations and homes to begin the long task of repairing the 
ravages of war. They had fought a valiant fight. The courage 
of the men and the self-sacrificing devotion of the women re- 
main a cherished tradition in Dixie Land. But there are few, 
if any, of the children of those who fought for the ^4ost cause" 
who would wish today that the outcome of the Civil War 
had been different — none who would not now echo the final 
benediction of Jefferson Davis on our common Union: ^^Esto 
perpetua ! " 

Government and People in War Time 

"In the clash of arms the laws are silent" runs the old 
Roman proverb. War tends inevitably to increase the power 
of the executive arm of government, even in democracies. Quick 
decision, unity of plan, efficiency in action, are the conditions 
of military success, which ill tolerates the slow deliberations of 
a legislative body or that insistence on the right of free expres- 
sion of opinion which is cherished as a fundamental liberty by 
self-governing peoples. The United States and the Confederate 
States of America proved no exception to this general rule in 
the Civil War. 

From the fall of Fort Sumter to the meeting of the extra 
session of Congress nearly three months later, Abraham Lin- 
coln was virtually a "dictator." By executive proclamation he 
increased the regular army and navy of the United States by 
some 40,000 men, although he had no constitutional right to 
add a single man to a regiment or a ship. He proclaimed a 
blockade of the ports of the cotton states and threatened with the 
fate of pirates anyone who should molest the commerce of the 
United States, although a blockade is an incident of war and war 
had been neither declared nor recognized. He authorized Gen- 
eral Scott to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus and make mili- 
tary arrests anywhere on the line between Philadelphia and 
Washington, although the right to suspend the writ is enumer- 
ated among the powers of Congress in the Constitution (Art. I, 
sect. 9, par. 2), and a decision of Chief Justice Marshall at the 



THE CIVIL WAR 



593 



time of the Burr conspiracy had denied it to the executive. 
When Congress met on July 4, Lincoln confessed the unconstitu- 
tionality of his proclamations, which, he said, ^Vere ventured 
upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and a pub- 
lic necessity." Congress promptly and enthusiastically ratified 
his actions. A ^^higher law" had superseded the Constitution — 
the law of self-preservation. Throughout the war Congress 
cooperated with the President, conferring on him the power to 
suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus whenever and wherever he 
deemed it necessary and allowing him great freedom in the in- 
terpretation and execution of its acts. 

The administration at Washington was hardly consistent in 
its attitude toward the South. Lincoln held to the theory that the 
seceding states had not left the Union and could not leave the 
Union, but that groups of men in them, too numerous and pow- 
erful to be dealt with by the civil authorities, were in insurrec- 
tion against the United States. To recognize the Confederacy 
as a belligerent power would be virtually to concede that it was 
another nation," and yet to treat the Confederate armies and 
navies merely as masses of individual ^'traitors" would have 
been impossible and ridiculous.^ Therefore, while maintaining 
its claim to sovereignty over the citizens of the seceding states 
(as shown, for example, by the Nonintercourse Act of July 13, 
1 861, the Confiscation Act of August 6, 1861, and the exemption 
of parts of the slaveholding states from the application of the 
Emancipation Proclamation), the government at Washington 
virtually recognized the sovereignty of the Confederacy over 
the same citizens by according them the status of a belligerent 
power, with exchanges of prisoners, paroles, and the reception 
of overtures for peace. It was inconsistency — but the alter- 
native would have been rank inhumanity. 

iThe dilemma was presented in the autumn of 1861, when the crew of the 
privateer Savannah were brought as captives into New York Harbor. The men 
were convicted of piracy, in accord with Lincoln's proclamation of blockade. 
But when President Davis, invoking the lex talionis, threatened to treat an 
equal number of Union prisoners in the same way as these men were treated, 
the sentence was never carried out. 



594 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



The policy of the government in regard to slavery was revo- 
lutionized by the war. On the day after the battle of Bull Run 
both Houses of Congress, in accord with the RepubHcan plat- 
form and Lincoln's repeated statements, passed a resolution 
that ^^this war is not waged ... in any spirit of oppression, 
or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of 
overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established insti- 
tutions of those [seceded] states, but to defend and maintain 
the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union 
with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several states 
unimpaired ; that as soon as these objects are accomplished the 
war ought to cease." But when it appeared that the slaves were 
employed in the Confederate army, driving munition wagons, 
cooking in the camps, and digging at the trenches and fortifica- 
tions, a Confiscation Act was passed (xAugust 6) declaring such 
of them as ^Vere required or permitted to work in or upon any 
fort, navy yard, dock, armory, ship, or intrenchment against 
the lawful authority of the United States," to be forfeited. This 
act did not go far enough for those who believed that, since 
slavery was the cause of the war, the extermination of slavery 
should be the first object of the war. General Fremont, com- 
mander of the Department of the West, issued a proclamation 
(August 31) emancipating the slaves of all persons in Missouri 
in rebellion against the United States, but Lincoln ordered him 
to modify the proclamation to accord with the Confiscation 
Act.^ The President's great desire was to win the border states 
to a policy of compensated emancipation, and Congress went 
so far as to pass a resolution in April, 1862, offering to loyal 
slaveholders a maximum of S3 00 for each slave. On July 14 he 
summoned the members of Congress from the border states to 
the White House to urge them in person to accept this offer, 

similar proclamation by General Hunter of the Department of the South, 
nine months later, emancipated the slaves in the states of South Carolina, Georgia, 
and Florida. Lincoln repudiated this order too, declaring that he must reserve 
to himself the responsibility of setting the slaves free in any state, in his capacity 
as commander in chief of the army and navy. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



595 



but to his bitter disappointment they refused.^ A week later 
Lincoln read to his cabinet the draft of the Emancipation Proc- 
lamation. On the wise advice of Seward he postponed issuing 
the proclamation until a Union victory in the field should give it 
weight. Shortly after Lee's invasion of Maryland was checked 
at Antietam, Lincoln published the proclamation (September 
22), which announced that on January i, 1863, he would declare 
"forever free" the slaves in all the states which were in arms 
against the authority of the Federal government on that day. 

The Emancipation Proclamation was not an abolitionist docu- 
ment but a military punishment. It did not alter the actual 
status of the negro in the South, because it applied to just that 
part of the South where President Lincoln's authority was not 
recognized, and explicitly exempted those regions where it was 
recognized. Only the conquest of the South by arms actually 
liberated the slaves. Neither did the Proclamation accomplish 
the legal emancipation of the slaves. Except where it was done 
by state action (as in Missouri, Maryland, and Tennessee) this 
waited for the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 
1865. If, then, the Emancipation Proclamation meant neither 
the actual nor the legal abolition of slavery, one may ask why 
it should be classed with the Declaration of Independence and 
the Constitution of the United States as one of the "immortal" 
documents of our history. The answer is, Because it was the an- 
nouncement that henceforth the war was to be waged not only 
for the preservation of the Union but also for the permanent 
banishment of slavery from its borders. Congress had abolished 
slavery in the District of Columbia in April, 1862, and in all the 
territories of the United States in June. From the summer of 
1862 on, President Lincoln made the acceptance of a general 
emancipation program, as well as the restoration of the Union, 

1 Unfortunately the conference took place in the days of discouragement just 
after McClellan's failure before Richmond. James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty 
Years of Congress" (Vol. I, p. 447), says, ''The border state men, becoming 
doubtful of Union success, preferred to keep their slaves rather than part with 
them for bonds which would soon become valueless." 



596 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



a sine qua non of any terms of peace (see the Hampton Roads 
conference, p. 589^). 

The effect of the Emancipation Proclamation upon Europe 
was wholly favorable to the Union cause. Whether there should 
be one or two federations of states between Canada and the 
Gulf of Mexico was of little concern to most of the people 
across the Atlantic, but a war to abolish slavery roused the 
hearty response of all the humanitarian sentiment among the 
liberals of Great Britain and the Continent. A monster mass 
meeting, held in Exeter Hall in London, on January 29, 1863, 
acclaimed the Proclamation with cheers. Addresses of congrat- 
ulation came to Lincoln from antislavery societies and trade- 
unions. The workers of Manchester, although reduced to 
poverty by the stoppage of the cotton supply from the Southern 
states, sent a letter of sympathy, to which Lincoln gratefully 
replied in his own hand. 

At home, however, the results of the Proclamation were dis- 
appointing. It tended to unite the South and divide the North. 
The Southern press cynically referred to it as an attempt to stir 
up hatred against the slaveholder in order to atone for de- 
feat in the field" ;^ and malicious newspapers represented the 
language of the Proclamation as encouragement to negro insur- 
rection.^ Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster-General, warned 

^From the Emancipation Proclamation to the end of the war 1 80 ,000 negroes 
were enlisted in the Northern armies and fought with conspicuous bravery. The 
Confederate Congress, on May i, 1863, passed a resolution to the effect that 
"every white person being a commissioned officer . . . who shall command 
negroes or mulattoes in arms against the Confederate States . . . shall be deemed 
as inciting servile insurrection, and shall if captured be put to death or be 
otherwise punished at the discretion of the court." Yet toward the end of the 
war Jefferson Davis himself advised the Southerners to enroll their slaves " as an 
alternative to subjugation." General Lee approved the plan, believing that 
the negroes could be made "efficient soldiers," and on March 13, 1865, an act of 
the Confederate Congress provided for the "enlistment of colored people." The 
war ended before there were actually any negro regiments in the Southern armies, j 

2 The autumn of 1862 was the period of the brightest hopes of the South. 
It was in the very month of the Proclamation that the great triple offensive 
was launched by the Confederate armies (see page 571). 

3 A clause in the document read, "The executive government of the United 
States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and 



THE CIVIL WAR 



597 



Lincoln that the Proclamation would cost the administration 
the autumn elections." As a matter of fact, the Democrats did 
carry the important states of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, 
Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, all of which had gone for 
Lincoln in i860, and gained 32 seats in the House of Represent- 
atives. A narrow majority in Congress was saved for the admin- 
istration only by the return of a solid Republican delegation 
from Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky, where the voting was 
conducted under the supervision of Federal troops. But it is 
impossible, as is generally the case in American elections, to say 
how far the result was due to a single issue. There were causes 
enough for a Republican reverse at the polls in the autumn of 
1862 besides the Emancipation Proclamation: military arrests, 
the suppression of free speech, the suspension of the writ of 
Habeas Corpus, the failure of McClellan in the Peninsular cam- 
paign, the withdrawal of Lee's army intact from Maryland and 
of Bragg's from Kentucky.^ 

The first step in the process which was to make the abolition 
of slavery final and legal was taken on December 14, 1863, when 
the fortunes of the North had been repaired by the victories 
of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. Representative 
Ashley of Ohio introduced into the House a Thirteenth Amend- 
ment to the Constitution, prohibiting slavery within the United 
States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. A test vote in 
the House failed to secure the two thirds necessary for adoption, 
and the matter rested there until the next meeting of Congress, 
in December, 1864. Farragut had captured the forts of Mobile 
Bay, Lincoln had been triumphantly reelected, and Sherman 
had completed his famous march to the sea by the occupation 

maintain the freedom of such persons [slaves] ... in any efforts they may 
make for their actual freedom." The London Saturday Review, violently pro- 
Southern, said, "The American law-giver not only confiscates his neighbors' 
slaves, but orders those slaves to cut their masters' throats." 

1 Indeed, it was the opinion of men like Grimes of Iowa and Sumner of 
Massachusetts that the Emancipation Proclamation had actually saved the ad- 
ministration from defeat in the elections of 1862. "We made the Proclamation 
an issue," wrote Grimes to Chase, "and carried the state (Iowa) by bringing 
the radical electorate up to the polls." 



598 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



of Savannah when the momentous measure came before the 
House for the final roll call; on the afternoon of January 31, 
1865. The yeas were 119, the nays 56. When the vote was 
announced the members rose from their seats cheering wildly, 
while the crowded galleries answered with equally jubilant de- 
fiance of parliamentary rules. In honor of the great event the 
House immediately adjourned. The Thirteenth Amendment 
was ratified during the year by the legislatures of three fourths 
of the states and proclaimed in force in December. The cancer 
which for generations had been feeding on the strength of the 
Republic and for more than a decade threatening the life of the 
Union was finally removed by the dreadful surgery of civil war. 

Both President Lincoln and President Davis had to endure 
a vast amount of opposition from their own sections dur- 
ing the Civil War. Lincoln's deliberation was interpreted as 
vacillation, his poise as baffled confusion, and his silence as a 
confession of political and military bankruptcy. In the same 
breath he was ridiculed as a Simple Susan" and denounced 
as a ^Hyrant." The strict constitutionaHst was offended by his 
assumption of despotic" power in suspending the writ of Ha- 
beas Corpus and making military arrests. The men who were 
more concerned for the preservation of their personal liberty 
than for the preservation of the Union resented the arbitrary 
proclamations interfering with the freedom of speech and ac- 
tion.^ The extreme abolitionists thought that the South, cursed 
with slavery, was not worth keeping in the Union — espe- 
cially at the cost of rivers of blood and unhmited treasure. The 
more moderate abolitionists scolded Lincoln for repudiating the 
proclamations of Fremont and Hunter and for not making 
the war from the beginning a crusade against slavery.^ The 

1 Especially the drastic proclamation of September 24, 1862, subjecting to mil- 
itary arrest, imprisonment without bail or privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus, 
and trial by court-martial of all persons "discouraging volunteer enlistments, 
resisting military drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, or affording any aid 
and comfort to rebels against the United States." 

2 Horace Greeley's editorial entitled ''The Prayer of Twenty Millions," in 
the New York Tribune of August 20, 1862, was the most conspicuous example 
of the pressure brought to bear on Lincoln to declare immediate emancipation. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



599 



Copperheads, like the secessionists, protested against the '^coer- 
cion" and subjugation" of sovereign states." The slacker re- 
sented the Conscription Act of March 3, 1863, and resisted the 
draft/ 

Even Congress, which had loyally supported the President 
since its ratification of his extraordinary war measures in the 
summer of 1861, finally turned against him. Lincoln issued a 
proclamation in December, 1863, looking toward the restora- 
tion of the seceded states to their place in the Union. Whenever 
10 per cent of the qualified voters of i860 in any state should 
take an oath of allegiance to the United States, accept the acts 
of Congress and the proclamations of the President on the sub- 
ject of slavery, and reestablish a state government, he would 
recognize that government as a true state. ^ The radical Repub- 
licans and the Democrats, under the lead of Henry Winter 
Davis of Maryland in the House and Benjamin Wade of Ohio 
in the Senate, opposed Lincoln's plan as too lenient to the South 
and a usurpation of power by the executive. They got a bill 
through Congress declaring that the seceded states were out of 
the Union and requiring a clear majority of the voters of any 
state to take the oath of allegiance before its reconstruction 
could begin. For readmission into the Union a state must 
accept the abolition of slavery, repudiate its debt incurred in the 

Lincoln patiently replied: ''My paramount object in this struggle is to save the 
Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the 
Union without freeing any slave, I would do it ; and if I could save it by free- 
ing all the slaves, I would do it. . . . What I do about slavery and the colored 
race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union ; and what I forbear, I 
forbear because I believe it would not help to save the Union." 

severe draft riot occurred in New York in July, 1863, in which over a 
thousand persons lost their lives, and which was quelled only after four days of 
horror, by an order from the provost marshal suspending the draft in New 
York and Brooklyn and by the return of the militia regiments from Gettysburg. 
A chief cause of the riot was the hostility between the immigrant laborers and 
the colored men of New York. The Irish resented the employment of negroes 
as strike-breakers and refused to be drafted into a war to fight for "niggers." 

2 This was limited, of course, to executive recognition. Lincoln had no power 
to assure representatives and senators from the restored "states" seats in Con- 
gress, each House being the judge, by the Constitution, of the qualifications of 
its own members. 



600 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



support of the Confederacy, and exclude certain classes of 
people from holding office. The Davis-Wade Bill was submit- 
ted to the President for his signature on the very day (July 4, 
1864) that Congress was to adjourn. Unwilling to accept the 
doctrine that the seceded states were out of the Union, or to 
adopt as yet any single rigid scheme for their reconstruction, or 
to see the work already begun in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Ten- 
nessee under his 10 per cent plan undone, Lincoln withheld his 
signature from the Davis-Wade Bill.^ The authors replied by a 
fierce attack on the President in the New York Tribune, accus- 
ing him of a ^'studied outrage on the legislative authority of the 
people" at the dictation of personal ambition and warning him 
that ^4f he wishes our support, he must confine himself to his 
executive duties — to obey and execute and not to make the laws 
— to suppress by arms armed rebelhon, and leave political reor- 
ganization to Congress." It is little wonder that under the 
burden of political opposition and personal detraction greater 
than that borne by any other president since the days of George 
Washington the lines in Abraham Lincoln's face deepened into 
furrows and the genial smile faded from his lips and eyes. 

Jefferson Davis had perhaps even a harder burden to bear. 
At least, he lacked the qualities of his Northern rival which 
alleviated the burden. In the place of Lincoln's physical robust- 
ness he had a nervous, delicate, high-strung constitution. His 
wife wrote that again and again he came home from his office 
tormented by a racking headache and apparently on the verge 
of a complete mental collapse. His mind was rigid, lacking that 
great flexibility of judgment and willingness to be persuaded 
which were so conspicuous in Lincoln's mental temper. He was 
not charitable of opposition, and, above all, he entirely lacked 
the saving grace of humor, which in Lincoln's large mind was 

lAs the president has ten days for the consideration of any bill passed by 
Congress, he can defeat a bill handed to him within ten days of adjournment 
simply by putting it in his pocket. The "pocket veto" of the Davis- Wade Bill 
was important as the first gun in a long and bitter battle between the president 
and Congress over their respective spheres of authority in dealing with the 
reconstruction of the seceded states. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



6oi 



the solvent of a thousand cares and worries. The exigencies of 
war compelled Davis to be as ^'autocratic" as Lincoln, but the 
temper and tradition of the South were far less favorable to 
executive centralization. It was only as a "nation'' that the 
South could fight the war with any hope of success, yet the in- 
veterate states'-rights pretensions constantly stood in the way 
of Southern nationalism. Nothing could exceed the fidelity of 
the men and officers in the field and the self-sacrificing devotion 
of the women at home to the Southern cause, but the political 
opposition to President Davis's conduct of the war, in the press, 
the Congress, and the state governments, was constant and 
bitter. Editors of influential papers called him ''an incubus" 
and spoke of him as directing the war "from his cushioned seat 
in Richmond." His vice president, Stephens, characterized him 
as "a man of good intentions, weak, vacillating, timid, petulant, 
peevish, obstinate, and aiming at absolute power." A Virginia 
newspaper friendly to the administration begged the opposition 
press to stop complaining of "imaginary violations of the Con- 
stitution" and to hold up the president's hands; for "only 
when our independence is achieved, established, and acknowl- 
edged," it said, "will the sovereignty of the states be a reality."^ 
Governors of states, especially the original states of the sea- 
board, resisted the acts of Congress for the conscription of men, 
the impressment of food, the suspension of the writ of Habeas 
Corpus, the control of the militia, and the regulation of their ex- 
ports and imports, as an invasion of their sphere of authority. 
The convention of South Carolina proposed to allow no recruit- 
ment of soldiers within the state except with the consent of the 
legislature. The impetuous Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia 
denounced the Conscription Act as "unconstitutional" and 
scolded the administration after the fall of Atlanta for "leaving 
Georgia to her fate." He threatened the Secretary of War, 
Seddon, that he would call all the sons of Georgia to "return to 
their state and rally round her glorious flag." He was ready to 
fight both the Union and the Confederacy if they did not stop 

1 General Lee, with unwonted sarcasm, remarked that "the mistake of the 
South was in making all its best military officers editors of newspapers." 



602 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



invading the sovereign rights of Georgia. Governor Vance of 
North CaroHna, a precisionist and an obstructionist, carried on 
an acrimonious and interminable correspondence with the au- 
thorities at Richmond, objecting to every measure of Congress 
or the executive that was designed to help win the war. He freed 
military prisoners by the defiant issue of the writ of Habeas 
Corpus, ignored the orders from Richmond for the control of 
commerce and the requisition of produce, threatened at one 
time to raise militia to drive the regular troops out of a part of 
his state, and gave his belated support wholly to the Southern 
cause only toward the close of the war, when he was confronted 
with the dilemma of choosing between the peace party, who 
were wilHng to ^'secede from secession," and the war party, 
who stood for Southern independence. Vance seemed incapable 
of realizing that it was impossible for the South to wage the war 
with the remotest prospect of success if the sovereign rights 
of the states were to remain unimpaired. Compared with the 
behavior of Brown and Vance the opposition of Governor Sey- 
mour of New York to Lincoln was mild. In no state of the 
secession did Davis have the cordial and enthusiastic support 
that was given to Lincoln by war governors like Andrew of 
Massachusetts, Morton of Indiana, Yates of Illinois, Dennison, 
Tod, and Brough of Ohio, Randall of Wisconsin, Sprague of 
Rhode Island, and Curtin of Pennsylvania. 

After Cameron's removal from the War Department at the 
beginning of 1862, no member of Lincoln's cabinet was seriously 
antagonized by Congress until poHtical opposition to the Blairs 
caused the resignation of the Postmaster-General, in Septem- 
ber, 1864. But the legislature at Richmond was constantly har- 
assing President Davis's secretaries and forcing changes in the 
cabinet. The special objects of criticism were C. C. Memminger 
of the Treasury and the brilliant Judah P. Benjamin, ^^the 
ablest, most versatile, and most constant of all Davis's civil coun- 
sellors," who occupied successively the positions of Attorney- 
General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State, and whom 
Davis, in spite of the most bitter attacks from Congress, stead- 
fastly refused to dismiss. At the beginning of 1865 a delegation 



THE CIVIL WAR 



603 



from Congress waited on President Davis with the request that 
all the members of the cabinet except Secretary Trenholm (who 
had succeeded Memminger in the Treasury) be asked to resign; 
and at the same time there were rumors of a cabal in Congress 
(like the Conway Cabal in the Revolutionary War) to set aside 
Davis himself and offer a dictatorship to General Lee. 

Notwithstanding all this opposition to the ^'tyranny" of Jef- 
ferson Davis, the Confederate administration was, on the whole, 
more observant of constitutional limitations than was the Fed- 
eral government. Lincoln was authorized by the act of March 3, 
1863, to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus whenever and wher- 
ever he pleased ; but the Confederate Congress, in spite of the 
fact that the invading armies were encamped on the soil of 
the South, never gave President Davis this blanket authority. 
The writ was suspended in the South only for limited periods be- 
tween the spring of 1862 and the summer of 1864, and mihtary 
arrests were allowed only for ^Hreason, conspiracy, desertion, 
and communicating intelligence to or trading unlawfully with 
the enemy." ^ The Confederate Congress never made its paper 
money (Treasury notes) legal tender, as the North did the 
"greenbacks"; it never created a national banking-system to 
float and support its bonds, as Secretary Chase did (see 
page 607) ; it never organized a Supreme Court, as it was di- 
rected to do by the Constitution, "in view," says Schwab, "of 
the particularistic feeling which such an enlargement of the 
central authority would have necessarily stimulated."^ 

Turning now from the strictly political to the politico- 
economic aspects of the two sections, we note first the striking 
difference in the methods of the North and of the South in pro- 
viding the enormous sums of money needed to finance the war. 
The North was a highly developed industrial and agricultural 
country, with large amounts of money in circulation and on de- 
posit in the banks, thus offering the government a fair field for 
loans and taxes. Except in a few centers, like New Orleans, 

1 Compare the drastic proclamation of Lincoln's of September 24, 1862 
(page 598, n. i). 

2 J. C. Schwab, ^'The Confederate States of America," p. 220. 



604 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Charleston, and Richmond, the South had scant supplies of fluid 
capital. Its wealth was in the cotton crop, and the eventual 
marketing of that crop was the resource on which the entire 
fiscal policy of the Confederacy was based. Though the North 
issued about $450,000,000 of greenbacks, or non-interest-bearing 
Treasury notes, these notes were hardly more than one fifth of 
the regular bonded loans, with interest payable in coin ; and after 
the machinery of taxation in customs duties, internal revenue, 
and income taxes got to working, the amounts received from 
these sources more than equaled the issues of paper money. 

The South, on the other hand, became committed early in 
the war to the issue of Treasury notes and never realized more 
than trifling amounts of specie from taxation or loans. Just 
what volume of non-interest-bearing notes the Confederate 
government issued is not known, but conservative scholars esti- 
mate it at no less than $1,000,000,000. For example, in the 
first nine months of the year 1863 the receipts of the Con- 
federate Treasury were $600,000,000, of which only $5,000,000, 
or less than i per cent, were from taxes, $153,000,000 (25 per 
cent) from the sale of bonds, and $442,000,000 (74 per cent) 
in notes. Although the Confederate government did not make 
the notes legal tender,^ it still found itself obliged, by their 
rapid depreciation, to resort to partial repudiation. In February, 
1864, when the paper dollar was worth only 6 cents, the holders 
of the notes were given the option of converting them into 4 per 
cent bonds or accepting a new standard of value, in which three 
of the old dollars were equal to two of the new. This act gave 
the finishing stroke to Confederate credit. Secretary Trenholm 
wrote to Governor Bonham of South Carolina in August, 1864, 
'^Apprehensions of ultimate repudiation crept like an all- 
pervading poison into the minds of the people, and greatly 
diminished the purchasing power of the notes." 

^Some of the state governments, however, compelled creditors to receive the 
notes, and public opinion was exerted in various ways to coerce those who re- 
fused them. The legislature of Florida passed an act in 1863 providing that 
anyone who was exempt from military service should be put into the ranks 
immediately if he refused to accept the Treasury notes. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



605 



The North was slower than the South in making provision 
for the war. Long before the extra session of Congress met at 
Washington, July 4, 1861, the provisional Congress at Mont- 
gomery had seized the money in the mints of the South and 
secured nearly half the available specie in the Southern banks 
by a $15,000,000 loan at 8 per cent, the interest on which was 
guaranteed by an export duty of one eighth of a cent a pound 
on cotton. In March it had issued the first $1,000,000 of 
Treasury notes and in May provided for a loan of $50,000,000 
(later increased to $150,000,000) in twenty-year bonds, for 
which cotton and produce were receivable. The Federal Con- 
gress in July authorized Secretary Chase to borrow$2 50,000,000, 
increased the tariff, and levied a direct tax of $20,000,000 on the 
states and an income tax of 3 per cent on incomes above $800. 
By an appeal to the New York bankers Chase secured a loan 
of $150,000,000 in August, but the opening of the year 1862 
found the Federal government in debt $100,000,000, with an 
estimated need of $250,000,000 to $300,000,000 more before 
the end of June. The people of the North were able and willing, 
as the event proved, to bear heavy taxation, but it would be at 
least a year before the new tax schedules would yield their 
revenue to the Treasury, and meanwhile the need for money 
was pressing. ^^We must have at least $100,000,000 during the 
next three months," said Spaulding in the House, ^^or the 
government must stop payment.'' 

Under these circumstances, and in spite of great opposition 
from bankers and economists. Congress resorted to that most 
tempting, dangerous, and ultimately most expensive method 
of procuring funds; namely, the creation of an unsupported 
paper currency. An act of February 25, 1862, authorized the 
issue of $150,000,000 non-interest-bearing Treasury notes, 
which were to be legal tender, receivable for all debts and public 
dues except duties on imports. On the same day Congress voted 
an issue of $500,000,000 in 6 per cent bonds, due in twenty 
years but redeemable at the pleasure of the government after 
five years. These bonds were called the ^^five-twenties." The 
Treasury notes^ or greenbacks, were convertible into the five- 



6o6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



twenties, and it was hoped that they would be rapidly turned 
into the Treasury in payment for the bonds. A new tax bill fol- 
lowed on July I, imposing taxes on almost every product of in- 
dustry and process of exchange.^ On July 14 the tariff was 
raised. 

The greenbacks, aside from being of doubtful constitution- 
ality,^ were a source of injustice, since they furnished debtors 
with a currency for paying their debts cheaper than that in 
which the debts had been contracted. Moreover, the easy ex- 
pedient of printing paper and endowing it with the quality of 
money " by jiat proved (as it always has in history) too strong 
a temptation to a government in urgent need of funds. What 
was intended as a temporary stimulant became a regular diet. 
By successive issues the volume of greenbacks was raised to 
$449,338,902 in 1864. The inevitable result was an inflation 
of prices and speculation in specie. Gold stood at 172 in Feb- 
ruary, 1863, and rose to 285 in July, 1864, when General Early 
was threatening the defenses of Washington. The government 
thought that it would be more profitable to issue greenbacks 
than to sell its bonds for what they would bring in the market 
(estimated at 60) ; but it actually lost hundreds of millions by 
this policy.^ For with gold at 2 85 the government was receiving 
for its bonds paper dollars worth only 35 cents and was paying 
in coin 17 per cent on its 6 per cent bonds. 

At the opening of 1863 the Federal government was in a bad 
way financially. The debt was nearing $1,000,000,000, and the 
expenses were $2,500,000 a day. The arrears of pay to the 
soldiers and sailors were $60,000,000. Gold was at a premium 

1 These taxes, growing with business, brought to the Treasury the immense 
sum of $311,000,000 during the year 1866. 

2 The Constitution (Art. I, sect. 10, par. i) forbids the states to make any- 
thing but gold and silver legal tender, and it was argued that the national 
government could not, or should not, commit an economic injustice which it 
had forbidden to the states. In a case in the Supreme Court, five years after 
the war. Chase himself, then Chief Justice, pronounced against the constitution- 
ality of the greenbacks. 

2 It also bequeathed the country the "greenback problem" in currency leg- 
islation, which was not settled until fifteen years after the war. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



607 



of 72. The bonds were not selling, and the failure of the Army 
of the Potomac to take Richmond had brought widespread dis- 
couragement. At this critical time Secretary Chase executed 
the most successful financial measure of the war in the creation 
of the national banking-system. On February 25, 1863, an act 
of Congress provided that any group of not fewer than five per- 
sons, furnishing a capital of $100,000 in cities of over 10,000 
inhabitants and of $50,000 in smaller centers, might organize a 
banking-association. They must purchase United States bonds 
to the amount of at least one third of their paid-up capital, and 
in return they should receive from the Comptroller of the Cur- 
rency notes equal to 90 per cent of the market value of the 
bonds. These ^^bank notes" were a true national currency, 
receivable for all dues to the United States (except customs 
duties, which must be in coin for the payment of the interest 
on the bonds) and protected from the fluctuations of the state- 
bank currency by the credit of the United States bonds behind 
them. By an act of March 3, 1865, a tax of 10 per cent was 
imposed on the notes of the state banks, driving them out of 
circulation. They had been a source of confusion and em- 
barrassment in our currency since the formation of the govern- 
ment, and their replacement by a national currency was one of 
the most beneficent results of the Civil War.^ 

The National Bank Act was a blessing in every way. Besides 
creating a stable and reliable^ national currency it opened an 
eager market for the sale of the government's bonds. $300,- 
000,000 of greenbacks came into the Treasury in exchange for 
them. The bankers, in addition to receiving the interest on the 
bonds deposited with the Comptroller, enjoyed the profits from 

iln 1861 there were nine hundred state banks issuing notes without a specie 
basis. According to the Bankers' Magazine of January, 1863, $170,000,000 of 
the $202,000,000 of state-bank notes then in circulation had either no security 
or very bad security behind them. Various bankers' associations had tried in 
vain to cope with the situation, by refusing to accept the issues of banks which 
did not comply with certain rules. 

2 The notes of the state banks were subject to all kinds of fluctuations and 
were so easily counterfeited that a manual called the Bank Detector was an 
indispensable equipment for every cashier. 



6o8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



the loan of the bank notes; and the business interests of the 
country at large, through the multifarious transactions of credit 
and discount, were enlisted in the support of the government 
securities which lay behind their currency. It was an ingenious 
device for distributing the burden of the debt through the com- 
munity without the sinister features of a forced loan or currency 
inflation, which characterized the issue of the greenbacks. And 
the national-bank system served the country well until the 
twentieth century, when the bonded indebtedness of the United 
States became too narrow a basis for the support of a currency 
adequate to the increasing volume of business.^ Three months 
after the act the condition of the Treasury was greatly improved. 
The victories of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga fur- 
ther strengthened the public credit, and in his annual message 
of December, 1863, President Lincoln could announce, with 
other cheering news, that ^'all demands on the Treasury" had 
been promptly met and fully satisfied," and that ^^by no people 
were the burdens incident to a great war ever more cheerfully 
borne." There was discouragement enough, and political dis- 
affection to follow in 1864, but national bankruptcy was not 
among the worries. 

The financial condition of the South, on the other hand, grew 
steadily worse after the spring of 1863. When the $20,000,000 
or so of specie obtained at the beginning of the war^ had been 
exhausted by the purchase of supplies and munitions abroad, the 
Confederate government found it impossible to get money. The 
flood of Treasury notes sent prices soaring, and as expenses in- 
creased, the only way of meeting them was by new issues of 
notes — making a vicious financial circle. The Confederate paper 
dollar was worth only 33 cents in gold at the beginning of 1863. 
After Gettysburg and Vicksburg it sank to 10 cents, after Chat- 
tanooga to 5 cents, and at the close of the war to 1.6 cents. 
Flour sold at 1 1000 a barrel, shoes at $200 a pair, coffee at 

iThe remedy was found in the Owen-Glass Act, of 1913, which established 
the Federal Reserve banking-system. 

2 This had been secured through the seizure of the money in the mints and 
from the $15,000,000 loan, which took most of the available specie in the banks. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



609 



$40 a pound, and wood at S5 a stick. When the farmers refused 
to sell their produce for the depreciated notes, the government 
commandeered it by impressment. But the process was waste- 
ful a-nd inefficient. Supplies of beef, bacon, flour, and cotton 
were accumulated at points whence they could not be dis- 
tributed for lack of an adequate transportation system, or were 
destroyed before the advance of the Federal armies or sold by 
dishonest agents. The fever of speculation raged. Everybody 
was anxious to convert the sinking notes into commodities be- 
fore they sank still further. A national banking-system like 
that of the North, although discussed, was impossible, for there 
was no stability in the bonds on which it must necessarily have 
rested. Even the best of the bond issues (the $15,000,000 loan, 
secured by the duty on cotton exports), which stood at 90 in 
the spring of 1862, dropped to 40 before the end of the year, as 
the blockade shut off the cotton trade, and were quoted at 5 
and under in 1864. 

The most promising attempt of the Confederate government 
to secure specie from abroad was the Erlanger loan. Early in 
1863, when the military hopes of the South were high, Secretary 
Memminger arranged with Emile Erlanger, a Paris banker, 
for floating in Europe a loan of $15,000,000, bearing 7 per cent 
interest, the principal payable in New Orleans cotton at 1 2 cents 
a pound, within six months after the conclusion of peace. As 
cotton had advanced in England from 14 cents a pound in May, 
1 86 1, to 44 cents in December, 1862, the loan offered roseate 
promises of profit — provided the South could get the cotton to 
Europe.^ Erlanger took the bonds at 77 and sold them readily 
in England at 95^, the loan being oversubscribed in London 
threefold in two days. But with the improvement in the Federal 
finances the Erlanger bonds began to drop. The Confederate 

^At the time of the loan the Confederate government had on hand over 
350,000 bales of cotton, obtained from the produce loan and impressment, which 
at 12 cents a pound would have far more than covered the Erlanger loan. But the 
inexorable Federal blockade kept the cotton from the market. Of all the 430,000 
bales which the government secured during the war, less than 20,000, or 5 per 
cent, got through the blockade. 



6 10 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

government spent $6,000,000 of the proceeds in '^bulling" the 
London market, buying back the bonds at 90 to keep the price 
up. But it was in vain. Gettysburg and Vicksburg sent them 
down to 65 ; Chattanooga, to 37. They recovered with the re- 
newal of Confederate hopes in 1864, and on McClellan's nomi- 
nation for the presidency on a platform which promised peace 
they reached 84; but they quickly fell off again, and became 
worthless with the triumph of the Union arms in 1865. The 
bondholders lost $10,000,000.^ The Confederate government, 
after deducting the discounts and commissions to Erlanger 
and the money spent in bulling the market, realized only 
$6,250,000.^ Only Erlanger profited by the transaction, clear- 
ing up some $2,500,000 on the deal. 

In the Civil War, as in all wars, ^'the instincts of trade con- 
flicted with the instincts of patriotism." The extremity of the 
government was the opportunity of the profiteer. Huge profits 
were made by selling supplies (often of inferior quality) to the 
government and by speculating in the fluctuating values of all 
commodities. The high price of cotton in the North offered 
temptations to the planter that could not be resisted. Politi- 
cians, officials of the government, and even generals in the field 
speculated in cotton. Northern currency was quoted on the 
Richmond exchange and freely circulated in the South at the 
close of the war in spite of laws against it. The economic con- 
dition of the Confederacy can be summed up in a word: the 
blockade isolated the South, which was not sufficiently de- 
veloped in manufactures, transportation, banking, or capital 
accumulations to take care of itself. The blockade starved 
the South into surrender. None of the Northern victories, 
except Vicksburg and Nashville, wiped out Southern armies; 
but the steady pressure of the blockade reduced the whole 

iFrom time to time for twenty years after the close of the war the English 
bondholders entertained hopes of recovering some of their lost fortunes, even 
though the Confederate debt was repudiated by the Fourteenth Amendment. 

^Schwab estimates that this $6,250,000, with the ^1^15,000,000 loan of 1861 and 
the $5,500,000 from customs and the mints, — a total of about $27,000,000, — 
"constituted the entire specie revenue of the Confederacy during its four years 
existence" (J. C. Schwab, "The Confederate State of America," p. 42). 



THE CIVIL WAR 



6ii 



South to a degree of destitution which made the further support 
of armies impossible. 

The North, on the other hand, after a temporary economic 
embarrassment caused by the actual shock of war, the loss of the 
Southern markets, the confiscation of the $200,000,000 owed 
to the North by the Southern planters and merchants, the drain 
of specie from the banks, and the disappearance of a metallic 
currency,^ entered with the year 1863 on a period of industrial 
prosperity which continued increasingly through the war. Pro- 
fessor Fite, in his Social and Industrial Conditions in the 
North during the Civil War," has presented a bewildering array 
of statistics to show the progress in agriculture, manufactures, 
commerce, transportation, public works, education, and chari- 
ties in these four years. The unprecedented demand of the 
government for supplies of all kinds, — munitions, horses, 
wagons, blankets, shoes, clothing, and food, — the enlarged 
European market for our grain and beef, and the issue of an 
abundant national currency all stimulated industry and sent 
prices soaring. Millionaires began to abound, and, while luxury 
and extravagance ran riot, contributions to charities and endow- 
ments were never more generous. The Sanitary Commission, 
the Christian Commission, Ladies' Aid Societies, and numerous 
other associations for the relief of the soldiers and their families 
were the precursors of the Red Cross,^ the "Y's", the Knights 
of Columbus, and other relief agencies of the great World War. 
The Sanitary Commission alone spent about $25,000,000 for 
the care and comfort of soldiers in the field and in soldiers' 

iThe banks suspended specie payments at the close of 1861, and not only 
gold but silver began to be an object of speculation. Silver coins disappeared 
from circulation, and their place was taken by postage stamps and "shin- 
plasters" — or tokens of indebtedness issued by tradesmen, hotel and restaurant 
keepers, business concerns, and shopkeepers. By an act of July, 1862, Congress 
prohibited the use of shinplasters, and later substituted for the inconvenient, 
sticky postage stamps a varicolored "scrip" of small notes ranging in value 
from 3 to 50 cents. This paper "fractional currency" was not replaced by coins 
for more than a decade after the war. 

2 The Red Cross was organized, at Geneva, in 1863, but not joined by the 
United States until after the Civil War. 



6l2 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



homes. The women, both North and South, were tireless in 
their devotion to works of mercy, though the women of the 
South were called upon to endure a greater burden of self- 
sacrifice and sorrow than their more fortunate sisters of the 
North.^ 

The war brought important developments in the relations of 
capital and labor. It hastened the tendency, visible in the dec- 
ade of the fifties, toward the consolidation of capital. In the 
first place, the needs of the government encouraged business 
on a large scale. The enormous currency issues and the huge 
profits furnished abundant capital for investment. Rising prices 
called for the reduction of expense in management and over- 
head charges. The multiplicity of taxes on products in every 
stage of manufacture made the combination of as many indus- 
trial processes as possible in a single establishment profitable.^ 
And, finally, the combinations of manufacturers into powerful 
associations enabled them to exert an influence on the govern- 
ment in its tariff legislation. These factors all worked against 
the small manufacturer, breaking up that ^'self-reliant local- 
ism" in industry which had prevailed generally before the war. 

The lion's share of the benefits of the new industry went to 
the capitalists. Prices and profits increased far more rapidly 
than wages, the estimated ratio for the whole period of the 
war being about loo to 55. Those who felt the pinch of high 
prices most were the classes without organization for exerting 
pressure on the economic world, — the unskilled laborers and the 
poor seamstresses, — or people living on fixed salaries; like clerks, 

1 Speaking at one of the great fairs of the Sanitary Commission at Wash- 
ington in 1864, President Lincoln said: "I am not accustomed to the language 
of eulogy ; I have not studied the art of paying compliments to women ; but I 
must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of 
the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would 
not do them justice for their conduct during this war. I will close by saying, 
God bless the women of America ! " 

2Fite cites the example of the textile industry. There was a tax of 2 cents 
a pound on the sale of raw cotton, 6 cents a pound on the yarn, 6 per cent on 
the woven product, 6 per cent on the dyed fabric. The firm which did its own 
spinning, weaving, and dyeing avoided all these taxes but the last (E. D. Fite, 
"Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War," p. 166). 



THE CIVIL WAR 



613 



clergymen, school-teachers, and college professors.^ Before the 
war there were very few labor unions in the country, and 
those were limited in location and meager in membership. ^^In 
general," says Fite, labor was contented when the war came 
and little need of united action was felt."^ But with the sharp 
rise in prices and the tightening of capitalistic control, labor 
began rapidly to organize. Painters, plasterers, carpenters^ 
hat-makers, bricklayers, masons, tailors, telegraphers, engi- 
neers, cigar-makers, and a score of other trades were unionized. 
Nearly fifty new unions were represented at a meeting in New 
York near the close of 1863. Indeed, the modern problems of 
American labor — the strike, the boycott, the lockout, the 
"scab," picketing, collective bargaining, arbitration — may al- 
most be said to have originated in the sharp bifurcation of 
capital and labor during the Civil War. 

This concentration of industrial life was simply one aspect 
of the general centralizing tendency of the war. Our country 
was first welded into a true Union in the fierce fires of that 
ordeal. The national state replaced the federation of states. 
The war was not only the triumph of the North over the South, 
of freedom over slavery — it was also the triumph of nationalism 
over states' rights, of Webster over Calhoun. Besides creating 
a national currency, a national banking^system, a national army, 
and national taxes, the war extended and enhanced the power of 
the central government in a score of ways. All the jealous re- 
strictions of a former generation were broken through. Congress 
assessed a direct tax upon the states, raised a national mili- 
tia within their borders, cut off the western counties of Vir- 
ginia and admitted them as a new state to the Union, exercised 
full sovereignty in all the territories, gave homesteads to West- 

ipor example, women in New York City, in 1864, working fourteen hours 
a day making underwear earned less than $1.50 a week. Eight hundred school- 
teachers in Philadelphia received 80 cents a day — less than a washerwoman's 
wages. 

^"Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War," p. 204. 
The London Times of December i, 1863, said, "If ever there was a country in 
which labor was in clover, in which it was petted and humored, it certainly 
was this North American community." 



6i4 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



ern farmers, endowed colleges in all the states for the promotion 
of agriculture and the mechanical arts, made large grants of land 
to a Pacific railroad and underwrote its bonds. The National 
Republicans of 1825, a John Quincy Adams or a Henry Clay, 
would have stood aghast at the nationalism of the Republicans 
of 1865. When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861, he 
stood before ^'blocks of marble and piles of iron castings" of 
an unfinished Capitol. During the war the House and Senate 
wings were completed and the building was crowned with its 
majestic dome. The finished Capitol was the symbol of the 
achievement of the national state. Had the South won its in- 
dependence it is not probable that it could any more have main- 
tained the contradiction of a ^'nation" of sovereign states" 
than could our government in the days of the Confederation.^ 

It remains to speak briefly of our foreign relations during the 
war. The governments of Europe^ with two conspicuous ex- 
ceptions, were favorable to the Union. Great Britain, still gov- 
erned by an aristocracy which had not changed essentially since 
the eighteenth century, and France, under the hypnotic influ- 
ence of that prince of adventurers the emperor Napoleon III, 
gave their official (and often officious) sympathy to the Con- 
federacy. The governing class in England regarded the planter 
aristocracy of the South as a higher social order than the as- 
sertive, leveling democracy of the North, while the great mer- 
cantile and industrial interests on which the power of the Whig 
aristocracy was based resented the protective tariff and the 
blockade of the cotton ports. Napoleon's animus against the 
Union proceeded rather from a general jealousy of the power 
of the great transatlantic republic and the desire to complete 
his uncle's abandoned project of restoring the diminished in- 
fluence of the Latin race in the Western Hemisphere. Napo- 

1 Rhodes contrasts centralization North and South as follows: "The Federal 
gSDvernment may be called a dictatorship. Congress and the people surrendered 
certain of their powers and rights to a trusted man. The Confederacy was a 
grand socialized state, in which the government did everything. It levied directly 
on the produce of the land and fixed prices. It managed the railroads, operated 
manufacturing establishments, owned merchant vessels, and carried on foreign 
commerce" ("History of the Civil War," p. 394). 



THE CIVIL WAR 



leon was far less scrupulous than the Queen's ministers in 
observing the obligations of a neutral. He tried in vain to get 
Great Britain and Russia to join him in forcing the United States 
to agree to an armistice of six months. He encouraged the ex- 
treme pro-Southern advocates in Parliament, like Roebuck. He 
gave audiences to Jefferson Davis's special envoy, Slidell, per- 
mitting him to have ships built for the Confederacy in Bordeaux 
and Nantes, provided their destination were kept secret. He 
was instrumental in floating the only considerable Confederate 
loan in Europe (see page 609). And, finally, he defied the 
Monroe Doctrine by erecting an empire in Mexico at the point 
of French bayonets. But, on the whole, our contact with 
France was so slight that we could permit Napoleon to continue 
his persistent and ineffective meddling until the close of the 
war, when we promptly extinguished his phantom empire in 
Mexico. 

Great Britain, on the other hand, was the one European 
power with whom our relations had been continuous, intimate — 
and generally unfriendly. As mistress of the seas, as our chief 
transatlantic customer, as our permanent neighbor on the north, 
as the people bound to us by the ties of kinship, language, and 
tradition, Great Britain could never be regarded with indiffer- 
ence by the United States. We expected England to understand 
us better, to judge us more fairly, to support our common ideals 
of liberty more heartily, than did any other foreign nation.^ But 

^This solicitude appears constantly in public dispatches and private corre- 
spondence, in lectures, sermons, essays, and poetry, during the war, sometimes 
in the pathetic language of disillusionment, sometimes in accents of bitter 
reproach. Lowell wrote in his second series of " Biglow Papers " : 

"We know we have a cause, John, 
Thet's righteous, just, and true; 
We thought 'twould win applause, John, 
Ef nowheres else, from you." 

The correspondence of Charles Sumner and John Bright is filled with this sen- 
timent. Our minister to England, Charles Francis Adams, sums up the indict- 
ment agamst Great Britain as follows: "That Great Britain did, in the most 
terrible moment of our domestic trial in struggling with a monstrous social evil 
she had earnestly professed to abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to 



6i6 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



from the very beginning of the war President Lincoln had noth- 
ing but trouble with the Palmerston ministry. In the first 
place, the Queen's proclamation recognized the Confederacy 
as a belligerent power in May, 1861, before the South had won 
a battle on land or sea and before the American minister had 
arrived in London. There was no intention of offending the 
United States in this action, as Lord John Russell, the Foreign 
Minister, explained to Adams. It was only Great Britain's 
way of announcing her strict neutrality. Moreover, Lincoln, 
by his proclamation of a blockade a month before, had virtu- 
ally recognized the South as a belligerent power. For all that, 
England's action seemed like a premature expression of sym- 
pathy for the Montgomery government, and it certainly gave 
encouragement and standing to the Confederate agents who had 
been sent abroad to purchase supplies and win the favor of the 
European powers. 

Toward the close of the year the resentment against Great 
Britain found expression in a dramatic incident. Messrs. Mason 
and Slidell, commissioners of the Confederate government to 
England and France respectively, passed through the blockade 
and on November 7 boarded the British mail steamer Trent 
at Havana, bound for Liverpool. The next day the American 
sloop-of-war San Jacinto, Charles Wilkes captain, stopped the 
Trent by a shot across her bows and forcibly removed the com- 
missioners, carrying them to a fort in Boston Harbor. The 
whole North rang with cheers for Captain Wilkes. He was 
congratulated by Secretary Welles, feted by the merchants 
of Boston, and complimented by Congress. Nevertheless, his 
deed was a violation of the law of nations and of the very 
principle which we had fought to maintain in the War of 181 2 
with Great Britain. When news of the Trent affair reached 
England the ministry dispatched 8000 troops to Canada and 
instructed Lord Lyons, their representative at Washington, to 
demand his passports if the prisoners were not released within 

master it, and then become the only foreign nation [ ?] steadily contributing in 
every way possible to verify its prejudgment" (James Schouler, "History of 
the United States," Vol. VI, p. 116). 



THE CIVIL WAR 



617 



a week. But Secretary Seward and Charles Sumner, chairman 
of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, had already 
convinced the administration, if not the country, of the injustice 
of Wilkes's action. Seward replied to Lord Lyons on December 
26 that Mason and SHdell would be cheerfully liberated." 
They were put on board an English steamer at Provincetown, 
Massachusetts, and the incident was closed, much to the dis- 
appointment of the South and of the ^^war-mongers" in Eng- 
land, who were anxious to aid in the disruption of the Union. 
Naturally, the Trent affair did not help to smooth the relations 
of the United States with Great Britain. 

But the most serious matter of controversy between the two 
countries was the building of ships in British yards to prey 
on the commerce of the United States. An act of Parliament of 
1 81 8 (the Foreign-Enlistment Act) forbade any subject of the 
realm to "equip, furnish, fit out, or arm any ship to be employed 
in the service of a foreign state, to commit hostilities against any 
state at peace with Great Britain„" James Bulloch of Georgia 
(a maternal uncle of Theodore Roosevelt) had been sent to 
England by the Confederate government to buy armed ships 
to molest the commerce of the United States. He secured from 
eminent English lawyers the opinion that it would be no in- 
fringement of the Foreign-Enlistment Act to build ships in Great 
Britain for any purpose, provided they were not "equipped" 
there, or to equip and arm them anywhere outside the realm. 
On the strength of this quibble he persuaded the shipbuilders 
of the Clyde and the Mersey to set to work. The Oreto was 
built by Laird and Sons at Birkenhead, ostensibly for the 
Italian government, and sailed for Nassau in March, 1862, 
where she was fitted out with her armament and, under the 
name of the Florida, was run into Mobile Bay. The "290," 
a much more powerful war vessel, was under construction at the 
same yards when Adams called the attention of the ministry to 
the breach of neutrality and asked that the vessel be detained. 
While the Collector of the Customs, the Lords of the Admiralty, 
the crown lawyers, and the Attorney-General were conducting 
their ponderous campaign of cross reference over the case, the 



6i8 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



"290" was completed. She slipped out of Liverpool the day 
before the orders for her detention came from the Solicitor- 
General. Proceeding to the Azores, she received her heavy- 
armament and was delivered over to Captain Semmes of the 
Confederate navy as the Alabama} The Georgia was built on 
the Clyde early in 1863 and armed on the French coast. The 
Alexandra (named for the new Princess of Wales) was built 
at Liverpool but held in port by the orders of the government. 
After a long process in the courts the builders were acquitted 
of breaking the Foreign-Enlistment Act. The vessel, however, 
was not delivered to the Confederacy. Finally, Adams made 
repeated, and as he feared fruitless, attempts to get Earl Russell 
to detain two powerful ironclad rams which Bulloch had build- 
ing with the Lairds at Birkenhead. On September 5, 1863, 
Adams wrote to Russell in the language of an ultimatum, ^'It 
would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that 
this is war." But the ministry, instructed by the case of the 
Alabama, and impressed by the victories of Gettysburg and 
Vicksburg, had already given orders two days before to have 
the rams detained. With this virtual confession of her un- 
neutral conduct. Great Britain ceased to give aid and comfort 
to the Confederacy. 

The damage wrought by these commerce-destroyers was enor- 
mous. The merchant fleet of the United States was practically 
driven from the ocean. ^^The Georgia, on her second voyage," 
said W. E. Forster in Parliament, ^'did not meet a single Ameri- 
can vessel in six weeks, though she saw more than 70 vessels 
in a few days." The Alabama alone destroyed more than 60 
American merchant ships before she was sunk by the Kear- 
sarge off the coast of Cherbourg, France, in a spectacular 
battle, June 19, 1864. The Shenandoah was still roaming the 
Pacific in search of her prey weeks after the war had ceased.^ 

1 Jefferson Davis said later, "There was no secrecy about the building of 
the Alabama.^^ 

2 The story of England's reparation for the damage done by these vessels, as 
determined by the adjudication of the ''Alabama claims" at Geneva, in 1872, 
belongs to a later chapter. 



THE CIVIL WAR 



619 



Napoleon's rash venture can be disposed of in a few words. 
Mexico, enormously rich in undeveloped natural resources but 
distracted by revolution and burdened with debt, had offered 
a tempting field for foreign invasion ever since her independ- 
ence from Spain. In the autumn of 1861 Great Britain, 
France, and Spain agreed at London on a joint expedition to 
Mexico to force the payment of her debts to them and the 
better protection of their citizens. Great Britain and Spain 
withdrew their fleets in the spring of 1862 ; but Napoleon de- 
termined to overthrow the government of President Juarez and 
set up a state to his own Hking in Mexico. Under General 
Forey and Marshal Bazaine 35,000 French soldiers fought 
their way up to Mexico City, where Bazaine organized a ^^gov- 
ernment" of subservient factionists, who formally offered the 
crown of the ^'Mexican Empire" to Napoleon's candidate, the 
Archduke Maximilian of Austria. That inoffensive and deb- 
onair prince, in an evil hour for his own happiness, accepted 
the precarious honor in an elaborate ceremony at his palace 
of Miramar, on the Adriatic. In June, 1864, he arrived in 
Mexico to rule his strange and unwilling subjects. 

The government at Washington kept a watchful eye on all 
these proceedings, although, much to the disappointment of the 
South, it refused to be diverted by them from its main task of 
winning the war. Seward warned Napoleon, in mildly remon- 
strative dispatches, that Mexico must enjoy a government of 
its own choice, and seemed willing for the time being to believe 
Napoleon's protestations that that was just what he was trying 
to give her. In spite of a belligerent resolution by the House,^ 
in April, 1864, the administration held to its noncommittal 

^The resolution was proposed by Henry Winter Davis, whose opposition to 
Lincoln's 10 per cent plan for the reconstruction of the Southern states we have 
already studied (p. 599). It declared that "it does not accord with the policy 
of the United States to acknowledge any monarchical government erected on 
the ruins of any republican government in America, under the auspices of any 
European power." The South, hoping that the United States and France would 
become embroiled, taunted Seward for his "gingerly" handling of the Mexican 
situation, accusing the administration of " arrant cowardice " for not vindicating 
the Monroe Doctrine. 



620 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



course, refusing to be stampeded into a war with France. As 
soon as the Civil War was over, however, General Sheridan 
was sent to the Texas border as a warning that the forbearance 
of the United States respecting this flagrant violation of the 
sovereignty of the jMexican Republic was at an end. The story 
of the withdrawal of the French troops and the seizure and exe- 
cution of the guileless puppet ''Emperor" Maximilian belongs 
to a later chapter. 

On the fourteenth of April, 1865, the fourth anniversary of 
the surrender of Fort Sumter, a great celebration was held in 
Charleston, At high noon General Anderson raised above the 
ruined walls of Sumter the same tattered flag that he had hauled 
down, while the guns from all the forts which had opened fire 
on that flag, in the gray dawn four years before, now greeted 
it with the national salute. At the banquet in the evening, in 
the city of Rhett and Calhoun, the list of speakers included 
the name of William Lloyd Garrison. That same evening. 
President Lincoln, relieved from the awful burden of four 
years, was seated with his wife and friends in a box at Ford's 
theater, when a self-appointed avenger of the defeated South, 
a half-deranged actor named John Wilkes Booth, stole up be- 
hind him and shot him in the back of the head. The President 
was carried unconscious to a house across the street, where he 
lingered till morning. At 7.21 his fitful breathing ceased and 
the low moans were stilled. Stanton, with streaming eyes, pro- 
nounced his epitaph: ''Now he belongs to the ages." 

"Sic semper tyrannis ! " was Booth's cry as he leaped from the 
President's box to the stage of the theater — "So be it ever to 
tyrants I " But no single trait of the tyrant's nature — pride, 
passion, cruelty, fear, suspicion, hate — found a place in Abra- 
ham Lincoln's noble heart. If he was, as Stanton said, "the most 
perfect ruler of men that ever lived," it was because his large 
sympathy embraced all the springs and motives of men's deeds. 
He never wished to rule, but only to "know and understand." 
"Come, now, let us reason together," was the divine invitation 
forever on his lips. And his justice was "likest God's" because 
mercy tempered it. His mind was already wholly occupied with 



THE CIVIL WAR 



621 



the healing of the nation's wounds. Three days before his assas- 
sination he spoke, in his last public utterance, from the balcony 
of the White House, of an announcement which he intended to 
make to the people of the South. In a last cabinet meeting on 
his last day, his words were all of kindness and sympathy for 
his fellow citizens who had been restored to the Union. He died 
at a moment propitious for his fame, quit of the greatest serv- 
ice that a man can do — the saving of the state. His name, 
with Washington's, will forever be a priceless heritage to the 
generations of our Republic. 

Our children shall behold his fame. 

The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, 

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise not blame. 
New birth of our new soil, the first American. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



The appended bibliography makes no claim to exhaustiveness. It is 
carefully selected with a view to the time available to the college student 
for collateral reading and study. Lists of hundreds of titles of reference 
at the end of each chapter, though they may show the erudition of the 
author, can be only a source of confusion and discouragement to the stu- 
dent. Ponderous collections of State papers, court decisions, congressional 
debates, executive documents, and the like are for the use of advanced 
graduate students and special investigators. The more modest lists that 
are given here contain books which are easily accessible to the college 
student and in which he may be expected to do considerable reading. 

An almost indispensable work of reference for the student of American 
history is the set of twenty-eight volumes entitled The American Nation 
(Harper & Brothers), edited by A. B. Hart. Each volume is written by a 
recognized scholar in the field, is based on the sources, and is provided with 
excellent maps, notes, and references. The important maps in this series 
have been collected in a volume entitled Harper's Atlas of American His- 
tory (New York, 1920), and supplemented by valuable "Map Studies" 
by Dixon Ryan Fox. The story of American history is covered in briefer 
space by the four volumes called The Riverside History of the United 
States, edited by W. E, Dodd (Houghton Mifflin Company). A third set, 
of fifty volumes. The Chronicles of America, pubhshed by the Yale Uni- 
versity Press, under the editorship of Allen Johnson, leaves nothing to be 
desired in the way of scholarship, style, or workmanship. Professor Edward 
Channing has been engaged for more than twenty-five years in the arduous 
task of writing a History of the United States from the days of Columbus. 
The sixth volume of this highly authoritative work (The Macmillan Com- 
pany, 1925) comes down to the close of the Civil War. The eight large 
volumes of John Bach McMaster's History of the People of the United 
States (D. Appleton and Company, 1883-1913) cover the period from the 
close of the American Revolution to the outbreak of the Civil War, with 
especial attention to the social and industrial life of the people. James 
Schouler's History of the United States, in seven volumes (Dodd, Mead & 
Company, 1880-19 13), is a purely political history of our country to the 
close of the Reconstruction period, with a marked tendency in favor of the 
New England view of national policies. James Ford Rhodes has given us 

i 



ii 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



a masterly treatise on the histor>' of slavery, the Ci\dl War, and Recon- 
struction in his seven-volume History of the United States jrorn the 
Compromise of i8jo (The Macmillan Company, 1892-1906), which is 
characterized by impartial judgment and great dignity and charm of style. 
Two later volumes, covering the period from 1877 to 1909, are less 
impressive. 

Xo secondar}' work on history-, however skillfully constructed or \ividly 
presented, can give the student the same sense of the reahty of the persons 
or the events of the past that he gets from the words of the actors them- 
selves. It is therefore highly desirable that the student should be in fre- 
quent touch with the sources of the narrative. Convenient collections of 
sources are Original Narratives of Early American History (18 vols., 
ed. J. Franklin Jameson) (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906-1917), illus- 
trating the founding and the histor>' of the various colonies ; American His- 
tory told by Co7itemporaries (4 vols., ed. A. B. Hart) (The Macmillan 
Company, 1897-1900), containing a great variety of selections from letters, 
speeches, debates, journals, tracts, travels, and poems, covering the whole 
period of our history' to the close of the nineteenth century ; A Documen- 
tary Source Book of America7i History, 1606-igij (ed. William Mac- 
Donald) (The Macmillan Company. 1908), containing political documents 
only, such as charters, legislative acts, proclamations, and treaties. 

The works of American statesmen from Benjamin Franklin dovni have 
been published in editions too numerous to catalogue here. 

The story of our industrial and economic development is well told in 
E. L. Bogart's Economic History of the United States (Longmans, Green 
& Co., 3d ed., 1918) and Harold U. Faulkner's American Economic His- 
tory (Harper & Brothers, 1924). G. S. Callender's Selectio7is from 
the Economic History of the United States, 1765-1860 (Ginn and Com- 
pany, 1909) is a collection of important economic sources, with valuable 
essays introducing each chapter. 

The seventh volume of The Cambridge Modem History (The Mac- 
millan Company, 1906) is devoted to the United States. A feature of the 
volume is the extensive bibliography filling eighty-one large octavo pages. 

The plan followed in the present bibhography is to cite first a few of 
the most important general works on the period dealt with in the chapter 
and then to give specific references on certain topics emphasized. These 
latter references will help the student in pursuing a subject which may 
have particularly interested him, and they may be used by the instructor 
in assigning special investigations and reports. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



iii 



CHAPTER I 
THE COLONIAL BACKGROUND 

H. L. Osgood's The American Colonies in the 17th Century (3 vols.) 
(The Macmillan Company) is the standard work on the period of the 
settlement and the early history of the colonies. It is particularly strong 
on the pohtical and institutional side of colonial history, and may be sup- 
plemented on the economic side by G. L. Beer's The Origins of the British 
Colonial System, 1578-1660, The Old Colonial System, 1660-1754, and 
British Colonial Policy, 1754-1765 (The Macmillan Company); also by 
W. B. Weeden's The Economic and Social History of New England, 1620- 
jySg (2 vols.) (Houghton Mifflin Company) and P. A. Bruce's Economic 
History of Virginia in the 17th Century (2 vols.) (The Macmillan Com- 
pany). For the eighteenth century we have no such comprehensive work 
as Osgood's. Good treatments in single volumes are E. B. Greene's Pro- 
vincial America, i6go-i740 (Harper & Brothers), J. A. Doyle's The Colonies 
under the House of Hanover (Henry Holt and Company), and O. M, 
Dickerson's American Colonial Government, i6g6-i76s (A. H. Clark and 
Co.). John Fiske, in his Old Virginia and her Neighbours (2 vols.), The 
Beginnings of New England, and Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America 
(2 vols.) (Houghton Mifflin Company), has given us a vivid, popular 
story of the early settlers. Edward Eggleston's The Transit of Civiliza- 
tion from England to America in the 17th Century (D. Appleton and 
Company) and C. McL, Andrews's Colonial Folkways (Yale Univer- 
sity Press) are interesting treatments of the social history of the colonies. 
For the French in America see Francis Parkman's great work, especially 
the volumes entitled The Old Regime in Canada, Count Frontenac and 
New France under Louis XIV, A Half Cetitury of Conflict, and Montcalm 
and Wolfe (Little, Brown and Company) ; also R. G. Thwaites's France in 
America (Harper & Brothers), A. G. Bradley's The Fight with France for 
the New World (A. Constable and Co.), Wm. B. Munro's Crusaders of 
New France (Yale University Press), and G. M. Wrong's The Conquest 
of New France (Yale University Press). A wealth of source material may 
be found in the Original Narratives of Early American History. The pe- 
riod treated in this chapter is covered by Channing, Vols. I, II ; The 
Riverside History, Vol. I (by C. L. Becker) ; The American Nation, Vols. 
IV-VII ; and The Chronicles of America, Vols. III-X. 

Topics for Research 

I. Foreign Elements in our Early Population : Channing, Vol. II, 
chap, xiv; H. P. Fairchild, Immigration, chap, ii; G. C. Lee, History of 
North America, Vol. IV, chaps, i, ii (Dutch and Swedish) ; Lucy F. Bit- 



iv 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



TiNGER, The Germans in Colonial Times; H. E. Jacobs, German Emigra- 
tion to America, 1700-1740 (Pennsylvania German Society, Proceedings, 
Vol. VIII) (with interesting illustrations) ; Charles Baird, The Huguenot 
Emigration to America, Vol. I, chap, ii, and Vol. II, chaps, xi-xiv ; A. M. 
ScHLESiNGER, The Significance of Immigration in American History {Amer- 
ican Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXVII, No. i). 

2. Social and Economic Conditions in Seventeenth-Century England: 
G. P. GoocH, English Democratic Ideals in the 17th Century, chap, viii; 
R. H. Gretton, The English Middle Class, chaps, v-viii; William Cun- 
ningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern 
Times, Vol. I, pp. 285-330. Consult also bibliography in E. P. Cheyney's 
The European Background of American History, pp. 327-331. 

3. The Acts of Trade : Channing, Vol. II, chaps, i, viii; G. L. Beer, 
The Old Colonial System, Part I, chaps, i-iv, and The Commercial Policy 
of England toward the American Colonies (Columbia University Studies, 
Vol. Ill, No. 2) ; C. M. Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, 
and Councils of Trade and Plantations, 1622-167$ (Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity Studies, Series XXVI, Vols. I-III) ; Hart, Conte?nporaries, Vol. II, 
Nos. 45, 46, 67, 85, 87, 131. 

4. Contrast between the English and the French System of Colonial 
Government : Francis Park man. The Old Regime in Canada, chaps, xvi- 
xix; J. G. BouRiNOT, Local Government in Canada (Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity Studies, Series V, Vols. V, VI); Joseph Wallace, Illinois and 
Louisiana under the French Rule ; R. G. Thwaites, France in America, 
chap, viii; E. B. Greene, Provincial America, chaps, iii-viii, xi. 

CHAPTER II 

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 

Out of the enormous mass of literature on the American Revolution a 
few works are cited here, the purpose of the selection being chiefly to give 
the student an idea of the various interpretati-ons of that basal event of our 
history. G. 0. Trevelyan's The American Revolution (Longmans, Green 
& Co.) is a fascinating work by a great English scholar whose sympathies 
are with the Americans in their struggle against the Tory program of 
George III. John Fiske's The American Revolution (2 vols.) (Houghton 
Mifflin Company) is a lively narrative, less critical than Trevelyan's, but 
no less favorable to the American cause. The Tory view is presented 
in Belcher's The First American Civil War (The Macmillan Company), 
Sidney G. Fisher's The Struggle for American Independence (2 vols.) 
(J. B. Lippincott Company), and Arthur Johnston's Myths and Facts of 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



V 



the American Revolution (Briggs, Toronto). Accurate and impartial treat- 
ments in single volumes may be found in W. E. H. Lecky's The American 
Revolution (D. Appleton and Company), edited by J. A. Woodburn from 
passages in Lecky's History of England in the i8th Century ; Edward Chan- 
ning's History of the United States, Vol. Ill (The Macmillan Company), 
with strong emphasis on economic factors; G. E. Howard's The Prelimi- 
naries of the Revolution (Harper & Brothers) ; and C. H. Van Tyne's The 
American Revolution (Harper & Brothers). A most valuable repository 
of the views of contemporary writers is M. C. Tyler's Literary History of 
the American Revolution (2 vols.) (G. P. Putnam's Sons). A. M. Schle- 
singer's Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (Columbia 
University Press) is an exhaustive study of the commercial controversy. 
For extensive lists of titles on the military, poHtical, and diplomatic his- 
tory of the Revolution, for the war in the West, and for the French aid, 
see the bibliographies in the Cambridge Modern History, VdI. VII, pp. 
780-784, and Van Tyne's The American Revolution, pp. 334-355. 

Topics for Research 

1. The Tories in the Revolution : C. H. Van Tyne, The Loyalists in 
the American Revolution; J. H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts', 
A. C. Flick, Loyalism in New York during the American Revolution; 
J. K. HosMER, Thomas Hutchinson; Massachusetts Historical Society, 
Proceedings, Series II, Vols. Ill, IV; M. C. Tyler, The Party of the 
Loyalists in the American Revolution {American Historical Review, Vol. 
I, pp. 24 ff.), and Literary History of the American Revolution, Vol. I, 
pp. 293-383; Hart, Contemporaries, Vol. II, Nos. 138, 154, 156-158, 
166-169. 

2. The War on the Frontier : F. J. Turner, George Rogers Clark and 
the Kaskaskia Campaign {American Historical Review, Vol. Ill, pp. 491 ff. 
and 506 ff.) ; W. H. English, Conquest of the Country Northwest of the 
River Ohio ; Illinois Historical Collections, Vol. I ; Theodore Roosevelt, 
The Winning of the West, Vols. II, HI; F. A. Ogg, The Old Northwest 
(Chronicles of America, Vol. XIX), chaps, ii-iv. 

3. French Aid in the Revolution : C. H. Van Tyne, Influences which 
determined the French Government to make a Treaty with America in 
1778 {American Historical Review, Vol. XXI, pp. 528 ff.); J. Jusserand, 
With Americans of Past and Present Days, chap, i (Rochambeau) ; Eliz- 
abeth S. Kite, Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence; 
Charlemagne Tower, The Marquis de Lafayette and the American Rev- 
olution; Old South Leaflets, No. 97 (Lafayette); E. S. Corwin, French 
Politics and the American Alliance of 1778. 



vi 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



4. The Declaration of Independence : Herbert Friedenwald, The Dec- 
laration of Independence, chaps, vii-ix (the purpose and philosophy of 
the Declaration), chaps, x, xi (analysis of the grievances cited); Mellen 
Chamberlain, The Declaration of Independence (Massachusetts Histori- 
cal Society, Proceedings, Series II, Vol. I) ; John H. Hazelton, The Dec- 
laration of Independence, chap, vi, ''Drafting the Declaration" (valuable 
for original material and facsimiles) ; C. E. Merriam, The Political Theory 
of Thomas Jefferson (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XVII, pp. 24 ff.). 

CHAPTER III 

FOUNDING THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 

John Fiske's Critical Period of American History (Houghton Mifflin 
Company) is an excellent account of the difficulties and dangers which 
our country passed through in the years from the close of the Revolution 
to the adoption -of the Constitution. A more extended treatment, em- 
phasizing the currents of public opinion, may be found in the first 
volume of J. B. McMaster's History of the People of the United States 
(D. Appleton and Company). A. C. McLaughlin's Confederation and 
the Constitution (Harper & Brothers) is one of the most scholarly and 
illuminating volumes in the American Natron Series. In Justin Win- 
sor's Narrative and Critical History of America (Houghton Mifflin Com- 
pany), Vol. VII, there are valuable essays entitled The Confederation, 
lySi-iySg, by Justin Winsor, and The Constitution of the United States 
and its History, by George T. Curtis. Max Farrand's Records of the 
Federal Convention (Yale University Press), in three large volumes, 
furnishes ample material for the study of the debates, minutes, and cor- 
respondence of the members of the Convention. The author has con- 
densed the most important material into a single volume entitled The 
Framing of the Constitution (Yale University Press). C. A. Beard's 
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States 
(The Macmillan Company) presents the Constitution as a conservative 
document registering the victory of the security-holders over the farmers. 
The Federalist is carefully edited by P. L. Ford, with an excellent intro- 
duction (Henry Holt and Company). The same author's Essays on the 
Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn) contains over eighty pubhc 
letters written by well-known men of the period, including five signers 
of the Declaration of Independence and seven members r»f the Federal 
Convention. For discussions of the power of the Federal government 
under the Constitution, see James Bryce's American Commonwealth 
(abridged edition) (The Macmillan Company), chaps, iii-xxvi. Everett 
Kimball's National Government of the United States (Ginn and Com- 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



pany) is an excellent account of the structure and working of our Fed- 
eral system, as is also J. A. Smith's Spirit of American Government 
(The Macmillan Company). William MacDonald's A New Constitu- 
tion for a New America (B. W. Huebsch) is a bold plea for a thorough 
revision of the Constitution. Carefully selected source material may be 
found in Allen Johnson's Readings in American Constitutional History 
(Houghton Mifflin Company), C. A. Beard's Readings in American Gov- 
ernment and Politics (The Macmillan Company), and Hart's American 
History told by Contemporaries (The Macmillan Company). 

Topics for Research 

1. Foreign Relations under the Confederation : J. W. Foster, A Cen- 
tury of American Diplomacy^ chap, iii, McMaster, Vol. I, chaps, iii, iv; 
Leon Fraser, English Opinion of the American Constitution and Govern- 
ment, lySj-iygS ; A. C. McLaughlin, The Western Posts and the British 
Debts (American Historical Association Reports, 1894) ; F. A. Ogg, The 
Opening of the Mississippi, pp. 400-460 ; W. C. Ford, The United States 
and Spain in lygo (introduction) ; and articles on the Spanish intrigues in 
the West (American Historical Review, Vol. VIII, p. 5 ; Vol. IX, p. 748 ; 
and Vol. X, p. 817). 

2. The Origins of our National Domain : B. A. Hinsdale, The Old 
Northwest, the Beginnings of our Colonial System; Justin Winsor, The 
Westward Movement, chaps, xxii, xxiii; R. L. Schuyler, Working to- 
wards a National Domain (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXVIII, 
p. 496); H. B. Adams, Maryland's Influence upon Land Cessions to the 
United States (Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series III, Vol. I); 
Thomas Donaldson, The Public Domain, chaps, v, vi (Report of the 
Pubhc Land Commission, 1881); Payson J. Treat, The National Land 
System, chaps, i-iii. 

3. Opposition to the Constitution : P. L. Ford, Pamphlets on the Con- 
stitution, p. 329; Hart, Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 70, 71, 73-75; 
A. C. McLaughlin, The Confederation and the Constitution, pp. 297-317; 
The Federalist (ed. P. L. Ford), introduction, pp. xix-xxix; C. E. Miner, 
The Ratification of the Federal Constitution by the State of New York', 
S. B. Harding, The Contest over the Ratification of the Federal Consti- 
tution in the State of Massachusetts (Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. II) ; 
A. J. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall, Vol. I, chaps, ix-xii. 

4. The Supreme Court : C. A. Beard, The Supreme Court and the 
Constitution ; B. F. Moore, The Supreme Court and Unconstitutional Leg- 
islation; E. S. CoRWiN, John Marshall and the Constitution (Chronicles 
of America, Vol. XVI) ; W. W. Willoughby, The Supreme Court of the 



viii THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



United States: its History and Influence on our Constitutional System] 
Everett Kimball, The National Government of the United States, chaps. 
XV, xvi ; William MacDonald, A New Constitution for a New America^ 
chaps, xvii, xviii. 

CHAPTER IV 

WASHINGTON AND ADAMS 

Of the older standard treatments of the period from 1789 to 1801, 
Richard Hildreth's History of the United States (Harper & Brothers), 
Series II, Vols. IV, V (chaps, i-xv), inclines strongly to the Federalist side 
while James Schouler's History of the United States (Dodd, Mead & 
Company), Vol. I, chaps, ii-iv, gives the Jeffersonian Republican due em- 
phasis. J. S. Bassett's Federalist System (Harper & Brothers) is a clear, 
impartial treatment which will serve the student better than any other 
single volume on the period. Edward Channing's History of the United 
States (The Macmillan Company), Vol. IV, chaps, i-viii, and J. B. 
McMaster's History of the People of the United States (D. Appleton and 
Company), Vols. I, II, chaps, vi-xi, are excellent general accounts. The 
development of parties may be studied in J. A. Woodburn's American 
Political History (G. P. Putnam's Sons), chap, ii, or J. P. Gordy's History 
of Political Parties ifi the U?iited States (Henry Holt and Company), Vol. 
I, chaps, i-xxii. W. H. Trescot's Diplomatic History of the Administra- 
tions of Washington and Adams (Little, Brown and Company), al- 
though an 'old book, is still extremely valuable. It may be supplemented 
by C. R. Fish's American Diplomacy (Henry Holt and Company), chaps, 
viii-xi. D. R, Dewey's Financial History of the United States (Longmans, 
Green & Co.), chaps, iv, v, contains an excellent account of the measures 
of Alexander Hamilton. C. A. Beard's Economic Origins of Jeffersonian 
Democracy (The Macmillan Company) is a masterly presentation of the 
struggle between the farmers and the security-holders in the last decade 
of the eighteenth century. The following collections of the works of the 
greatest statesmen of the period are recommended : The Writings of George 
Washingtoti (14 vols., ed. W. C. Ford) (G. P. Putnam's Sons), The 
Works of John Adams (10 vols., ed. C. F. Adams) (Little, Brown and 
Company), The Works of Alexander Hamilton (12 vols., ed. H. C. Lodge) 
(G. P. Putnam's Sons), and The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (10 vols., 
ed. P. L. Ford) (G. P. Putnam's Sons). For selections from sources see 
Hart's Contemporaries (The Macmillan Company), Vol. Ill, Nos. 83-105; 
William MacDonald's Documentary Source Book of American History 
(The Macmillan Company), Nos. 54-64; and Allen Johnson's Readings in 
American Coftstitutional History (Houghton Mifflin Company), Part III. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



ix 



A vivid and caustic commentary on the first two years of Washington's 
administration, by a disaffected senator from Pennsylvania, is found in the 
Journal of William Maclay (D. Appleton and Company). An exhaustive 
bibhography of the period, including references to debates in Congress, 
journals of the Houses, State papers, and manuscripts of the statesmen, can 
be found in the appendix of Bassett's Federal System, pp. 299-305. 

Topics for Research 

1. Social Conditions in George Washington's Day: McMaster, Vol. I, 
pp. i-ioi, and Vol. II, pp. 1-24; Channing, Vol. IV, chap, i; Justin 
WiNSOR, The Westward Movement, pp. 398-414; Timothy Dwight, 
Travels in New England and New York, lygd-iSis, Vol. I ; J. P. Brissot 
DE Warville, New Travels in the United States, 1778', Isaac Weld, 
Travels through the States of North America and Canada, I7gs-i7g7 (2 
vols.) (passim)] R. W. Griswold, The Republican Court (passim). 

2. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions : Text in MacDonald, Nos. 
61-64; F. M. Anderson, Contemporary Opinion of the Virginia and Ken- 
tucky Resolutions (American Historical Review, Vol. V, pp. 45 ff., 225 ff.) ; 
H. V. Ames, State Documents on Federal Relations, No. i, pp. 18-26; 
The Writings of James Madison (ed. Gaillard Hunt), Vol. VI, pp. 341- 
407; E. P. Powell, Nullification and Secession in the United States, 
chap, ii; E. D. Warfield, The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, 

3. Was Hamilton's Tariff Protective? F. W. Taussig, The Tariff His- 
tory of the United States, chaps, i, ii; The Annals of Congress, 1789-1791, 
Vol. I, pp. 192-231, 291-317, 324-336; Edward Stanwood, American 
Tariff Controversies in the 19th Century, Vol. I, chap, iii; J. L. Bishop, 
A History of American Manufactures, Vol. I, chap, x; F. W. Taussig, 
State Papers and Speeches on the Tariff, pp. 1-107; F. S. Oliver, Alex- 
ander Hamilton, pp. 228-240. 

"4. New Light on Citizen Genet's Mission: F. J. Turner, The Origin 
of Genet's Projected Attack on Louisiana and the Floridas (American 
Historical Review, Vol. Ill, p. 650); The Policy of France towards the 
Mississippi Valley in the Period of Washington and Adams (ibid. Vol. X, 
p. 249); The Diplomatic Contest for the Mississippi Valley (Atlantic 
Monthly, Vol. XCIII, pp. 676, 807); H. E. Bourne, The Correspondence 
of George Rogers Clark and Genet, 1793-1794 (American Historical Asso' 
ciation Report, 1896), p. 930. 



X THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

CHAPTER V 

THE JEFFERSONIAN POLICIES 

Henry Adams's History of the United States of America during the 
Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (9 vols.) (Charles Scribner's 
Sons) is the standard work on this period. Although Adams has a poor 
opinion of Jefferson and a still poorer Dne of Madison, his work is very 
valuable on account of the mass of material which he has incorporated 
in it from the manuscript collections in foreign archives. A more sym- 
pathetic presentation of Jefferson is given by Edward Channing, in his 
History of the Ufiited States (The Macmillan Company), Vol. IV, chaps, 
x-xx, and The Jeffersonia^i System (Harper & Brothers). Briefer but 
excellent treatments of Jefferson are to be found in Allen Johnson's Jef- 
ferson afid his Colleagues (Yale University Press) and Union and Democ- 
racy (Houghton Mifflin Company), chaps, vii-xii. The foreign pohcy of 
Jefferson and Madison is analyzed with fine judgment in A. T. Mahan's 
Sea Power in its Relation to the War of 18 12 (2 vols.) (Little, Brown and 
Company). Besides Adams and Mahan, the following works may be 
consulted for the War of 1812 : K. C. Babcock's Rise of American 
Nationality (Harper & Brothers), chaps, iv-x; Theodore Roosevelt's Naval 
War of 18 12 (2 vols.) (G. P. Putnam's Sons) ; and E. S. Maclay's His- 
tory of the United States Navy (3 vols.) (D. Appleton and Company), 
Vols. I, II (Part III, chaps, i-xvi). A wealth of material on social and 
economic conditions at the beginning of the nineteenth century will be 
found in the first six chapters of Henry Adams's work, in Timothy 
D wight's Travels in New England and New York (4 vols.) (New Haven), 
and in McMaster's History of the People of the United States (D. Apple- 
ton and Company), chaps, xii-xxix. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 
(10 vols., ed. P. L. Ford) (G. P. Putnam's Sons), The Writings of Albert 
Gallatin (3 vols., ed. Henry Adams) (J. B. Lippincott Company), The 
Writings of James Madison (9 vols., ed. Gaillard Hunt) (G. P. Putnam's 
Son's), and The Writings of James Monroe (7 vols., ed. S. M. Hamilton) 
(G. P. Putnam's Sons) furnish an abundance of letters on the period. The 
Jeffersonian Cyclopcedia (ed. J. P. Ftiley) (Funk & Wagnalls Company) 
is a huge volume containing extracts from Jefferson's writings, illustrat- 
ing some nine thousand topics arranged alphabetically. Selected source 
material will be found in Hart's Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Nds. 106-129; 
Johnson's Readings, Nos. 50, 57, 71, 72, 74, 77, 81-86; and G. S. Calen- 
der's Selections from the Economic History of the United States, 1765- 
i860 (Ginn and Company), pp. 239-260. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



xi 



Topics for Research 

1. The Florida Boundary Dispute : H. B. Fuller, The Purchase of 
Florida, chaps, iii-vi; F. E. Chadwick, The Relations of the United 
States and Spain, Vol. I, pp. 42-116; I. J. Cox, The American Intervention 
in West Florida {American Historical Review, Vol. XVII, pp. 290-311); 
Charles Gayarre, History of Louisiana, Vol. IV, pp. 211-243; E. S. 
Brown, The Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase, pp. 170- 
187 ; Henry Adams, History of the United States, Vol. II, chap. v. 

2. The Conspiracy of Aaron Burr: E. P. Powell, Nullification and 
Secession in the United States, chap, iv; F. T. Hill, Decisive Battles of 
the Law, chap, ii; Edward Channing, History of the United States, 
Vol. IV, pp. 336-344; W. F. McCaleb, The Aaron Burr Conspiracy, 
Writings of Thomas Jefferson (ed. Ford), Vol. VIII, pp. 481-504, and 
Vol. IX, pp. 1-67, 141-144 ; Henry Adams, History of the United States, 
Vol. Ill, chaps, x-xiv, xix ; James Parton, The Life and Times of Aaron 
Burr, chaps, xviii-xxvi; J. S. Bassett, The Life of Andrew Jackson, Vol. I, 
chap. iv. 

3. The Struggle for Neutral Trade : Ralph D. Paine, The Fight for 
a Free Sea (Chronicles of America, Vol. XVII) ; Writings of James Madi- 
son (ed. Hunt), Vol. VII, pp. 204 ff. ; Writings of Thomas Jefferson (ed. 
Ford), Vol. VI, pp. 470-484; A. T. Mahan, Sea Power in its Relation to 
the War of 18 12, Vol. I, pp. 114-127; Channing, Vol. IV, pp. 352-378 
(with excellent summary of Orders and Decrees) ; Clive Day, A History 
of Commerce, chap, xlvii; E. L. Bogart, Economic History of the United 
States, chap, ix; James Stephen, War in Disguise, or the Frauds of 
Neutral Flags. 

4. The Hartford Convention : Letter in American Historical Review, 
Vol. IX, pp. 96-104; Allen Johnson, Readings in American Constitu- 
tional History, Nos. 81-85 I Henry Adams, Documents Relating to New 
England Federalism ; Henry Adams, History of the United States, 
Vol. VIII, pp. 287-310; E. P. Powell, Nullification and Secession in the 
United States, chap, v; H. V. Ames, State Documents on Federal Rela- 
tions, No. 2, p. 10 ; S. E. MoRisoN, The Life and Letters of Harrison 
Grey Otis, Vol. II, pp. 78-199. For the text of the report of the Conven- 
tion see MacDonald, Documentary Source Book of American History, 
No. 70, pp. 293-302. 



xii 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



CHAPTER VI 

THE NEW NATIONALISM 

The first nine chapters of the fifth volume of Edward Channing's 
History of the United States (The Macmillan Company) are devoted 
to a survey of social and industrial conditions in the three decades fol- 
lowing the War of 1812. The student may well compare this survey with 
the work of similar purpose for the opening of the nineteenth century in 
the first six chapters of Henry Adams's History of the United States of 
America during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. In chap- 
ters X and xi Channing treats the political history of the administrations 
of Monroe and John Quincy Adams. K. C. Babcock's Rise of American 
Nationality (Harper & Brothers), chaps, xi-xviii, and F. J. Turner's 
Rise of the New West (Harper & Brothers) cover the period 'of the 
present chapter and are provided with excellent bibliographies. More 
detailed are the accounts in J. B. McMaster's History of the People of the 
United States (D. Appleton and Company), Vols. IV, V (chaps, xxiii- 
liii), and James Schouler's History of the United States (Dodd, Mead & 
Company), Vol. III. J. W. Burgess's Middle Period (Charles Scribner's 
Sons), chaps, i-viii, is a strictly poHtical narrative of the years 1816-1830. 
For the economic topics of the chapter see D. R. Dewey's Financial His- 
tory of the U?tited States (Longmans, Green & Co.); F. W. Taussig's 
Tariff History of the United States (G. P. Putnam's Sons) ; J. L. Bishop's 
History of American Manufactures (Philadelphia), Vol. II; and R. C. H. 
Catterall's Second Bank of the United States (University of Chicago Press). 
F. J. Turner's collected articles entitled The Frontier in American His- 
tory (Henry Holt and Company) are invaluable for the westward move- 
ment, to which may be added as interesting contemporary accounts 
Timothy Flint's Recollections of the Last Ten Years (Cincinnati) and 
History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley (Cincinnati) and J. M. 
Peck's New Guide for Emigrants to the West (Boston). Albert J. Bev- 
eridge's Life of John Marshall (Houghton Mifflin Company), Vol. IV, 
contains the best discussion of the great decisions of the Supreme Court. 
The diplomatic events of the period are treated in F. E. Chadwick's Rela- 
tions of the United States and Spain (Charles Scribner's Sons), Vol. I; 
F. L. Paxson's Independence of the South American Republics (Ferris 
and Leach); and J. H. Latane's United States and Latin America 
(Doubleday, Page & Company), chaps, i, ii, x. In addition to the works 
of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe cited in the preceding chapter, the 
student will find the following collections useful to consult by index : The 
Works of Henry Clay (10 vols., ed. Calvin Colton) (G. P. Putnam's 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



xiii 



Sons); The Works of John C. Calhoun (7 vols., ed. R. K. Cralle) (D. 
Appleton and Company) ; The Writings of John Quincy Adams (7 vols., ed. 
W. C. Ford) (The Macmillan Company) ; and The Memoirs of John 
Quincy Adams (12 vols., ed. C. F. Adams) (J. B. Lippincott Company). 
The biographies of Clay by Carl Schurz, of Calhoun by H. von Hoist, of 
John Quincy Adams by J. T. Morse, and of John Randolph by Henry 
Adams are all to be found in the American Statesmen Series (Houghton 
Mifflin Company). For selected source material see MacDonald's Documen- 
tary Source Book, Nos. 71-80; Hart's Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Part VII, 
Nos. 130-150 ; and Bogart and Thompson's Readings in the Economic His- 
tory of the United States (Longmans, Green & Co.), chaps, ix-xvii. 

Topics for Research 

1. Westward Migration and Travel: Tilly Buttrick, Jr., Voyages, 
Travels, and Discoveries (1812-1819), in R. G. Thwaites (Ed.), Early 
Western Travels, Vol. VIII, pp. 21-89; Morris Birkbeck, Notes on a 
Journey in America from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois 
(1817) ; H. B. Fearon, Sketches of America: a Narrative of a Journey of 
Five Thousand Miles through the Eastern and Western States of America 
(1817-1818) ; John Woods, Two Years^ Residence in the Settlement on 
the English Prairie in the Illinois Country (1820-1822); James Flint, 
Letters from America (1822); Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last 
Ten Years (1826); James Hall, Letters from the West; containing 
Sketches of Scenery, Manners, and Customs (1828); J. B. McMaster, 
History of the People of the United States, Vol. V, chap, xlviii. 

2. Internal Improvements : The Writings of James Monroe (ed. Hamil- 
ton), Vol. VI, pp. 216-284; David Hosack, Memoirs of DeWitt Clinton, 
Appendix; St. G. L. Sioussat, Memphis as a Gateway to the West (Ten- 
nessee Historical Magazine, March, 191 7); S. A. Mitchell, Compendium 
of the Internal Improvements of the United States ; G. S. Callender, Early 
Transportation and Banking Enterprises of the States in Relation to the 
Growth of Corporations {Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. XVII, 
PP- 3-54); H. G. Wheeler, history of Congress, Vol. II, pp. 109-513; 
John Quincy Adams, Memoirs, Vols. VI, VII; Bogart and Thompson, 
Readings, chap. xii. 

3. The Monroe Doctrine : Text in MacDonald, Documentary Source 
Book, No. 80; J. H. Latane, The United States and Latin America, 
chaps, ii, x ; A. C. Coolidge, The United States as a World Power, chap, v ; 
H. V. W. Temperley, The Latin- American Policy of Canning {American 
Historical Review, Vol. XI, pp. 779 ff.) ; W. C. Ford, John Quincy Adams 
and the Monroe Doctrine (American Historical Review, Vo\. VII, pp. 676ff., 



xiv 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



and Vol. VIII, pp. 28 ff.) and The Genesis of the Monroe Doctrine (Massa- 
chusetts Historical Society, Proceedings, Series II, Vol. XV, pp. 373 ff.) ; 
A. B. Hart, The Monroe Doctrine, an Interpretation; A. B. Hart, The 
Foundations of American Foreign Policy, chap, vii ; The Writings of James 
Monroe (ed. Hamilton), Vol. VI, pp. 343 ff. ; John Quincy Adams, 
Memoirs, Vol. VI, passim; F. E. Chadwick, The Relations of the United 
States and Spain, Vol. I, chaps, viii-x; W. F. Reddaway, The Monroe 
Doctrine. 

4. The Tariff of Abominations : American State Papers, Finance, 
Vol. V, passim ; F. W. Taussig, State Papers and Speeches on the Tariff, 
pp. 108-213, and The Tariff History of the United States, pp. 37-45, 
68-108 ; D. F. Houston, Nullification in South Carolina ; Edward Stan- 
wood, American Tariff Controversies in the igth Century, Vol. I, chap, 
viii; The Works of J. C. Calhoun (ed. Cralle), Vol. VT, pp. 1-59; Bogart 
and Thompson, Readings, chap, x, Nos. 4-6. 

CHAPTER VII 

"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON" 

A very satisfactory account of the Jacksonian era, especially on the 
personal and political side, is J. S. Bassett's Andrew Jackson (2 vols.) 
(The Macmillan Company). It may be supplemented on the financial side 
by W. G. Sumner's Andrew Jackson as a Public Man (American States- 
man Series) (Houghton Mifflin Company), Edward Stanwood's Tariff 
Controversies of the Nineteenth Century (Houghton Mifflin Company), 
and D. R. Dewey's Financial History of the United States (Longmans, 
Green & Co.). R. C. H. Catterall's Second Ba?ik of the United States (Uni- 
versity of Chicago Press) ; C. R. Fish's Civil Service and the Patronage 
(Harv^ard Historical Studies, Vol. XI) ; Commons and Sumner's Documen- 
tary History of American Industrial Society (10 vols.) (A. H. Clark and 
Co.) ; D. F. Houston's Critical Study of Nullification in South Carolina 
(Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. Ill), with Letters on the Nullification 
Moveme7it in South Carolina (American Historical Review, Vol. VI, pp. 
736-765, and Vol. VII, pp. 92-119) ; R. T. Ely's Labor Movement in 
America (Thomas Y. Crowell Company) ; E. R. Johnson's American Rail- 
way Transportation (D. Appleton and Company) ; and J. A. Woodburn's 
Political Parties and Party Problems in the United States (G. P. Putnam's 
Sons) are satisfactory treatments of those problems of the Jacksonian 
era which are indicated in the titles. The period of the chapter is treated 
in the standard histories of McMaster (Vol. VI, chaps, liv-lxix), Schouler 
(Vol. Ill, chap, xii, and Vol. IV, chaps, xiv, xv), and Channing (Vol. V, 



BIBLIOGRAPHVj 



XV 



chaps, xii-xiv). An excellent presentation in a single volume is William 

MacDonald's Jacksonian Democracy (Harper & Brothers), with carefully 
selected bibliography. F. A. Ogg's Reign of Andrew Jackson (Yale Uni- 
versity Press), C. H. Peck's Jacksonian Epoch (Harper & Brothers), 
and W. E. Dodd's Expansion and Conflict (Houghton Mifflin Company), 
chaps, i-vi, are scholarly and well written. For comments on the men and 
measures of the time, John Quincy Adams's Memoirs (cited above) and 
T. H. Benton's Thirty Years' View (with material from private papers of 
Jackson) (D. Appleton and Company) are invaluable. In addition to the 
works of Clay and Calhoun above mentioned, the student may use by 
index The Works of Daniel Webster (i8 vols., ed. J. W. Mclntyre) (Little, 
Brown and Company) and The Letters of Daniel Webster (ed. C. H. Van 
Tyne) (McClure, Phillips and Co.). M. Ostrogorski's Democracy and the 
Organization of Political Parties (The Macmillan Company), Vol. II, 
Part IV, chaps, i-iii, is very valuable here. The following biographies may 
be added : J. B. McMaster's Life of Daniel Webster (The Century Co.), 
F. A. Ogg's Daniel Webster (George W. Jacobs & Co.), E. M. Shepard's Life 
of Martin Van Buren (Houghton Mifflin Company), T. D. Jervey's Robert 
Y. Hayne and his Times (The Macmillan Company), and Theodore Roose- 
velt's Thomas Hart Benton (Houghton Mifflin Company). Alexis de 
Tocqueville's Democracy in America (ed. D. C. Oilman) (The Century 
Co.) is one of the most penetrating criticisms of our social and political 
Hfe ever written by a foreign visitor. In lighter vein are Frances E. 
Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (H. B. Bell), Frances B. 
Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, 1838-183Q 
(Harper & Brothers), and Harriet Martineau's Society in America (New 
York). Jackson's pubhc papers will be found in J. D. Richardson's 
Messages and Papers of the Presidents (10 vols.) (Washington), Vol. II. 
Selected source material for the period is presented in Hart's Contempo- 
raries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 158-186; MacDonald's Documentary Source Book, 
Nos. 82-95 ; and Bogart and Thompson's Readings, chaps, x-xvii. 



Topics for Research 

I. The Economic Basis of Nullification : C. S. Boucher, The Ante- 
Bellum Attitude of the South towards Manufactures and Agriculture 
(Washington University Studies, Vol. Ill, Part II, No. 2); U. B. Phillips, 
The Economic Cost of Slave-Holding in the Cotton Belt (Political Science 
Quarterly, Vol. XX, pp. 257-275), and Plantation and Frontier (Docu- 
mentary History of American Industrial Society, Vols. I, II) ; The Letters 
of Dr. Cooper (American Historical Review, Vol. VI, pp. 725 ff.) ; O. S. 
Callender (Ed.), Selected Readings in the Economic History of the 



xvi 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



United States, pp. 514-536, 539-542; M. B. Hammond, The Cotton In- 
dustry (American Economic Association, Publications^ 1897); J. B. Mc- 
Master, Vol. V, pp. 1 70 a. 

2. The War on the Bank : Schouler, Vol. IV, chap, xiii, sect. 3 ; J. Q. 
Adams, Memoirs, Vol. VIII; The Works of Daniel Webster, Vol. HI, 
pp. 391-447; C. CoLTON, Lije and Times of Henry Clay, Vol. II, chaps, 
iii, iv ; Clayton^ Report on the Condition of the Bank {House Reports, 
22 Cong., ist Sess., No. 460) ; R. C. McGrane, The Correspondence of 
Nicholas Biddle ; Carl Schurz, Henry Clay, Vol. I, chap, xiii ; Samuel 
Tyler, Roger B. Taney, Vol. I, chap, iii; T. H. Benton, Thirty Years' 
View, Vol. I. chaps, xl, xli, xlvi-xlviii. 

3. The Early Railroads : E. R. Johnson, American Railway Trans- 
portation, chap, ii; C. F. Adams, Jr., Railroads, their Origin and Problems, 
chaps, i, ii; G. S. Callender (Ed.), Selected Readings in the Economic 
History of the United States, pp. 345-348, 404-431 ; A. T. Hadley, Rail- 
way Transportation, its History and Laws, chap, ii; W. H. Brown, His- 
tory of the First Locomotives in America; Frances B. Kemble, Journal 
of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, pp. 161-172; U. B. Phillips, 
History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt, chap, iii; Meyer and 
MacGill, History of Transportation in the United States, pp. 422-427. 

4. Labor Conditions in the Jacksonian Era : Michel Chevalier, So- 
ciety, Manners and Politics in the United States, pp. 135-144, 341-344; 
Commons and Sumner, Documentary History of American Industrial 
Society, Vol. V, pp. 33 f., and Vol. VI, pp. 87 f.; Harriet Martineau, 
Society in America, Vol. II, pp. 53-60 ; R. T. Ely, The Labor Movement 
in America, pp. 7-60 ; F. T. Carlton, The Workingmen^s Party of New 
York City, i82g-i8ji (Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XXII, pp. 401 f.) ; 
J. R. Commons, Labor Organizations a7id Labor Politics {Quarterly Journal 
of Economics, Vol. XXI, pp. 323 f.); G. S. Callender (Ed.), Selected 
Readings, pp. 459-471; Edward Channing, History of the United States, 
Vol. V, chap, iv (with references in footnotes) ; S. P. Orth, The Armies 
of Labor, chap. ii. 

5. The Rise of the Whig Party : J. A. Woodburn, Political Parties 
and Party Problems in the United States, chap, iv; Edward Stanwood, 
History of the Presidency, Vol. I, chaps, xv, xvi; S. P. Orth, The Boss and 
the Machine, chaps, i, ii; McMaster, Vol. VI, chap. Ixix; Josiah Quincy, 
John Quincy Adams, chaps, viii, ix; A. D. Morse, The Political Influence of 
Andrew Jackson {Political Science Quarterly, Vol. I, pp. 153 ff.); C. H. 
Van Tyne, The Letters of Daniel Webster, pp. 141-205 ; H. J. Ford, Rise 
and Growth of American Politics, chaps, xiii-xv ; A. C. Cole, The Whig 
Party in the South, chaps, i, ii ; Martin Van Buren, Inquiry into Political 
Parties, chap, vii; C A. Davis, Letters of Major Jack Downing. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE ADVANCE TO THE PACIFIC 

The concluding chapters (xv-xviii) of Edward Channing's History of 
the United States, Vol. V (The Macmillan Company), treating of Western 
settlements in the decade 1840-1850, Cahfornia, Oregon, Texas, and the 
Mexican War, are the best general presentation of the history covered by 
the first two sections of this chapter. For the third section the student 
should turn to the first volume of James Ford Rhodes's great work entitled 
The History of the United States since the Compromise of 1850 (The Mac- 
millan Company), chaps, ii, iii, iv (with a masterly summary of the ef- 
fects of slavery on the South). G. P. Garrison's Westward Extension 
(Harper & Brothers) covers the decade 1840-1850 and has a careful 
bibliography for students who can pursue the study to Driginal sources. 
W. E. Dodd's Expansion and Conflict (Houghton Mifflin Company), chaps, 
vii-ix, is a clear and concise account of the period, and N. W. Stephenson's 
Texas and the Mexican War (Yale University Press) is a most readable 
little book prepared from excellent select sources. More extended accounts 
of the period may be found in the standard histories of McMaster, Vols. 
VII, VIII (chaps. Ixxii-lxxxix), and Schouler, Vols. IV, V (chaps, xvi- 
xx). J. W. Burgess's Middle Period (Charles Scribner's Sons), chaps, 
xiii-xvii, emphasizes the legal and constitutional aspects of the period. 
Special works, in greater detail, on the subjects treated in this chapter are 
L. G. Tyler's Letters and Times of the Tylers (3 vols.) (Richmond) ; 
W. P. and F. J. Garrison's William Lloyd Garrison (4 vols.) (The Cen- 
tury Co.), Vol. Ill; Justin H. Smith's Annexation of Texas (The Baker 
& Taylor Co.), whose undue emphasis on British intrigue in Texas 
may be corrected by E. D. Adams's British Interests and Activities in 
Texas, 18 38-1846 (Johns Hopkins Press) ; Justin H. Smith's War with 
Mexico (2 vols.) (The Macmillan Company), a work of extraordinary 
fullness and accuracy, very favorable to Polk and Scott ; G. P. Garrison's 
Texas, a Contest of Civilizations (Houghton Mifflin Company) ; The 
Diplomatic Correspondence of the Republic of Texas (3 vols.) {American 
Historical Association Reports, 1907-1909) ; Robert Greenhow's History 
of Oregon and California (Little, Brown and Company) ; W. A. Linn's 
Story of the Mormons (The Macmillan Company) ; Francis Parkman's 
Oregon Trail (Little, Brown and Company) ; H. H. Bancroft's California 
Inter Pocula (San Francisco) ; R. H. Dana's Two Years before the Mast 
(E. P. Dutton and Company) ; U. S. Grant's Personal Memoirs (The 
Century Co.) ; J. H. Latane's Diplomacy of the United States in Regard to 
Cuba (American Historical Association Reports, 1897) ; Ira D. Travis, His- 



xviii THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



tory of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (Michigan Political Science Association, 
Publications, 1900). The invaXndihXe Diary of James K.PolkhdiS been edited 
in four volumes by M. M. Quaife (Chicago Historical Society). Much inter- 
esting material on the period of the chapter will be found in John Quincy 
Adams's Memoirs, Vols. X-XII. J. C. Fremont's Report of an Explor- 
ing Expedition to Oregon and Northern California (New York) is a lively 
narrative. The Pro-Slavery Argument (J. B. Lippincott Company) con- 
tains apologies for the slave system by Chancellor Harper and Gover- 
nor Hammond of South Carolina, William Gilmore Simms, and Professor 
Dew of WilHam and Mary College. The four great speeches on the Com- 
promise of 1850 may be found in the works of Henry Clay (ed. Colton), 
Vol. IX, pp. 529-567; of Calhoun (ed. Cralle), Vol. IV, pp. S42-573 ; of 
Webster (ed. Mclntyre), Vol. X, pp. 57-98; and of Seward (ed. Geo. E. 
Baker) (Houghton Mifflin Company), Vol. I, pp. 51-93. James Russell 
Lowell's Present Crisis and Biglow Papers (First Series) are scathing in- 
dictments of the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War. Selected 
documents and sources on the period may be found in G. S. Callender's 
Selected Readings, pp. 597-665 ; Hart's Contemporaries, Vol. Ill, Nos. 
185-189, and Vol. IV, pp. 7-22 ; and William MacDonald's Documentary 
Source Book, Nos. 96-107. 

Topics for Research 

1. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty : John Bassett Moore, Interna- 
tional Arbitrations, Vol. I, chaps, i-vi; T. H. Benton, Abridgment of the 
Debates in Congress, Vol. XIV, pp. 576!; Niles' Register, Vol. LXIII, 
pp. 41-47, 53-63 (for official correspondence between Webster and Lord 
Ashburton) ; G. T. Curtis, Daniel Webster, Vol. II, chaps, xxviii, xxix, 
xxxii; W. F. Ganong, A Monograph of the Evolution of the Boundaries 
of New Brunswick, pp. 241-361 ; L. G. Tyler, Life and Letters of the 
Tylers, Vol. II, pp. 201-243 ; H. S. Burrage, Maine in the Northeastern 
Boundary Controversy ; E. D. Adams, Lord Ashburton and the Treaty 
of Washington {American Historical Review, Vol. XVII, pp. 746-782) ; 
Jared Sparks, The Webster-Ashburton Treaty {North American Review, 
Vol. LVI, pp. 452 ff.). 

2 . American Pioneers in Texas : Henry Bruce, Life of General 
Houston, pp. 64-156; L. A. Wright, Life of Stephen F. Austin {Austin 
College Bulletin, October, 1910) ; Texas in 1840, or the Emigrants' 
Guide', W. B. Dewers, Letters from an Early Settler of Texas; L. G. 
Bugbee, Some Difficulties of a Texas Empresario (Southern Historical 
Association, Publications, April, 1899) ; D. G. Wooten, A Comprehensive 
History of Texas, Part II, chaps, i-ix; E. Z. Rather, De Witt's ColotSr^ 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



xix 



(Texas State Histiorical Association, Quarterly, Vol. VIII, pp. 95-102); 
G. P. Garrison, Texas, a Contest of Civilizations, pp. 137-169, and The 
First Stage of the Movement for the Annexation of Texas {American 
History Review, Vol. X, pp. 72-96). 

3. The Gold-Seekers in California : Stuart Edward White, TheForty- 
Niners; H. H. Bancroft, California Inter Pocula; J. T. Brooks, Four 
Months among the Gold-Finders in California ; W. G. Johnston, The Ex- 
perience of a Forty-Niner; J. S. Hittell, The Discovery of Gold in^ 
California (Century Magazine, Vol. XIX, pp. 525-536) ; Josiah Royce, 
California, pp. 220-246, 278-356; Walter Colton, Three Years in Cali- 
fornia, pp. 242-290; Bernard Moses, The Establishment of Municipal 
Government in San Francisco. 

4. The Oregon Boundary Settlement : H. H. Bancroft, History of 
Oregon, Vol. I, chap, xiv; James K. Polk, Diary (index under "Oregon"); 
Travers Twiss, The Oregon Question ; L. B. Shippee, Federal Relations 
of Oregon (in Oregon Historical Society, Quarterly, Vol. XIX, pp. 89, 189, 
283) ; R. L. Schuyler, Polk and the Oregon Compromise {Political 
Science Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, pp. 443 ff.) ; Correspondence of J, C. Cal- 
houn (American Historical Association Reports, 1899), Vol. II, pp. 653- 
698, 1065-1083 ; Joseph Schafer, The British Attitude toward the Oregon 
Question (American Historical Review, Vol. XVI, pp. 273-299); C. H. Van 
Tyne, Letters of Daniel Webster, pp. 215, 227-330, 361 ; J. R. Wilson, 
The Oregon Question (Oregon Historical Society, Quarterly, Vol. I, pp. 
Ill if.). 

5. Plans for an Isthmian Canal : J. H. Latane', The Diplomatic Rela- 
tions of the United States and Latin America, pp. 176-195 ; G. F. Tucker, 
The Monroe Doctrine, chaps, iv-vi; W. F. Johnson, Four Centuries of 
the Panama Canal, pp. 51-77; Senate Executive Documents, 47 Cong., 
ist Sess. Vol. VI, p. 194 ; L. M. Keasbey, The Nicaragua Canal and the 
Monroe Doctrine; T, J. Lawrence, Disputed Questions in Modern Inter- 
national Law, pp. 89-142; 1. D. Travis, The History of the Clayton- 
Bulwer Treaty (Michigan Political Science Association, Publications, Vol. 
II, No. 8) ; Henry Huberich, The Trans-Isthmian Canal, pp. 6-1 5 ; 
J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States , Vol. VII, 
pp. 552-577. 

CHAPTER IX 

THE HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF 

James Ford Rhodes's History of the United States of America from the 
Compromise of 1850 (7 vols.) (The Macmillan Company) will be the 
student's main work x>i reference for this and the following chapter, 



XX THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



It is a work of the highest authority, accurate in statement, fair in judg- 
ment, and dignified in style. The period from the inauguration of Pierce 
to the fall of Fort Sumter is treated in Vol. I, chap, v, to Vol. Ill, chap, 
xiv. Rhodes may be supplemented on the legal side by J. W. Burgess's 
Middle Period, chaps, xviii-xxii, and The Civil War and the Constitution, 
Vol. I, chaps, i-vi (Charles Scribner's Sons). J. B. McMaster's valuable 
History of the People of the United States (D. Appleton and Company), 
with its exploitation of a wide range of popular sources, comes to an 
end with Buchanan's administration. Vol. VIII, chaps, xc-xcvii, of Mc- 
Master, and Vol. V, chaps, xxi and xxii, of Schouler, treat the period of the 
present chapter. Two volumes of the American Nation Series (Harper & 
Brothers) — T. C. Smith's Parties and Slavery and F. E. Chadwick's Causes 
of the Civil War — cover the decade i85o-i86o very satisfactorily and are 
provided with exhaustive bibliographies. The following volumes of the 
Chronicles of America (Yale University Press) contain interesting material 
on the period : Emerson Hough's Passing of the Frontier, W. E. Dodd's 
Cotton Kingdom, Jesse Macy's Anti-Slavery Crusade, N. W. Stephenson's 
Abraham Lincoln and the Union, and Jt)hn Moody's Railroad Builders. 
The Works of Abraham Lincoln (2 vols., ed. Nicolay and Hay) (The 
Century Co.), The Works of James Buchanan (12 vols., ed. J. B. Moore) 
(J. B. Lippincott Company), and The Works of Charles Simmer (15 
vols.) (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company) may be consulted by index. 
Nicolay and Hay's monumental Life of Abraham Lincoln (10 vols.) 
(The Century Co.) is indispensable for a thorough study of the great 
liberator. Of the scores of biographies of Lincoln in single volumes, 
perhaps that of Lord Charnwood (Constable & Company, London) is 
the best. Of the numerous biographies of other statesmen and lead- 
ing figures of the period, the following may be recommended : Stephen 
A. Douglas, by Allen Johnson (The Macmillan Company) and by Louis 
Howland (Charles Scribner's Sons) ; Jefferson Davis, by Armitage Gordon 
(Charles Scribner's Sons) and by W. E. Dodd (George W. Jacobs & Co.); 
Alexander H. Stephens, by Louis B. Pendleton (George W. Jacobs & Co.); 
W. H. Seward, by Frederick W. Seward (Derby and Co.), Vol. II ; James 
Buchanan, by G. T. Curtis (Harper & Brothers) ; S. P. Chase, by A. B. 
Hart (Houghton Mifflin Company) ; John Brown, by 0. G. Villard 
(Houghton Mifflin Company) ; /. /. Crittenden, by Mrs. M. Coleman 
(J. B. Lippincott Company). Buchanan's own apology for his position is in 
Mr. Buchanan's Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (D. Appleton 
and Company). Special works on important topics of the period are P. O. 
Ray's Repeal of the Missouri Compromise (Cleveland) and The Genesis 
of the Kansas-Nebraska Act {American Historical Association Reports, 
1914, pp. 259-280); G. H. Putnam's (Ed.) Political Debates between 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



xxi 



Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas (G. P. Putnam's Sons) ; 
Charles Robinson's Kansas Conflict (Harper & Brothers) ; Francis Curtis's 
Republican Party (2 vols.) (G. P. Putnam's Sons) ; E. S. Corwin's 
Dred Scott Decision in the Light of Contemporary Legal Doctrine (Amer- 
ican Historical Review, Vol. XVII, pp. 52-69) ; E. D. Fite's Presidential 
Campaign of i860 (The Macmillan Company) ; E. P. Powell's Nullifica- 
tion and Secession in the United States (G. P. Putnam's Sons), chaps, 
vii, viii ; J. B. Sanborn's Congressional Grants of Land in Aid of Railways 
(University of Wisconsin, Bulletin No. 30) ; F. L. Olmsted's Journey in 
the Seaboard Slave States . . . 18 5 3-18 54 (2 vols.) (G. P. Putnam's 
Sons). Neither Jefferson Davis's Rise and Fall of the Confederate Govern- 
ment (2 vols.) (D. Appleton and Company) nor Alexander H. Stephens's 
Constitutional View of the War between the States (2 vols.) (The Na- 
tional Publishing Co.) gives an adequate treatment of the important 
decade preceding the outbreak of the war. Invaluable material on the 
state of the country in 1850 can be found in the Eighth Census of the 
United States (4 vols.) (Washington), and an intimate view of the 
opinions of leaders in the South can be gathered from the voluminous 
Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell 
Cobb (2 vols., ed. U. B. Phillips) {American Historical Association 
Reports, 191 1). The text of the Dred Scott decision is contained in U. S. 
Reports, 19 How. 393-633, and is summarized in William MacDonald's 
Documentary Source Book, pp. 406-420. Other important source material 
is to be found in MacDonald, Nos. 109-115; Hart's Contemporaries, 
Vol. IV, Nos. 19-69; Bogart and Thompson's Readings, chap, xxii; and 
G. S. Callender's Readings, pp. 738-793. 

Topics for Research 

1. Bleeding Kansas : J. D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the 
Presidents, Vol. V, pp. 352-360, 390, 401-407, 449-454, 471-481 ; The 
Works of James Buchanan, Vol. X, pp. 105-325, and Mr. Buchanan's 
Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion, pp. 28-56 ; Henry Wilson, 
The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. II, chaps, xxxv- 
xxxvii ; Charles Robinson, The Kansas Conflict, chaps, v-xiii ; John 
Greenleaf Whittier, The Kansas Emigrants and Brown of Ossawat- 
omie ; Hart, Contemporaries, Vol. IV, Nos. 36-40 ; L. W. Spring, Kan- 
sas, the Prelude to the War for the Union, chaps, iii-xii, and The Career 
of a Kansas Politician {American Historical Review, Vol. IV, pp. 80-104) ; 
W. L. Fleming, The Buford Expedition to Kansas {American Historical 
Review, Vol. VI, pp. 38-48). 

2. The Origin of the Republican Party : Edward Stanwood, The HiS' 
tory of the Presidency, chaps, xix, xx; G. W. Julian, Personal Recol- 



xxii THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



lections, pp. 134-150; Francis Curtis, The Republican Party, Vol. I, 
pp. 172-234; T. C. Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the 
Northwest (Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. VI), chaps, xiv-xix; W. E. 
DoDD, The Fight for the Northwest (American Historical Review, Vol. 
XVI, pp. 774-788) ; A. D. Morse, The Republican Party (Political Science 
Quarterly, Vol. VII, pp. 522-535); C. H. Van Tyne, Letters of Daniel 
Webster, pp. 475-542 ; D. S. Alexander, The Political History of New 
York, Vol. II, chaps, xiii-xvii; Frederic Bancroft, The Life of William H. 
Seward, Vol, I, pp. 291-311, 363-397, 410-431 ; Allen Johnson, Stephen 
A. Douglas, pp. 260-280 ; The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 
I, pp. 178-226; Jesse Macy, History of Political Parties . . . 1846-1860^ 
chaps, xi, xiii, xv. 

3. The Career of "William Walker : H. H. Bancroft, History of the 
Pacific States, Vol. Ill, chaps, xvi, xvii ; James J. Roche, The Story of 
the Filibusterers \ William Walker, The War in Nicaragua', McMaster, 
Vol. VIII, pp. 1 89-19 1, 340-344 (with references to contemporary news- 
papers) ; C. W. DouBLEDAY, Rcminisccnces of the Filibuster" War in 
Nicaragua; W. V. Wells, Walker's Expedition to Nicaragua; W. O. 
ScROGGS, Walker and the Steamship Company (American Historical Re- 
view, Vol. X, pp. 792-811); William Walker, General Walker's Policy in 
Central America (De Bow's Review, February, i860). 

4. The Nomination of Abraham Lincoln : G. W. Julian, The First 
Republican National Convention (American Historical Review, Vol. IV, 
pp. 313-322) ; NicoLAY and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, pp. 255-278; 
J. F. Rhodes, History of the United States, Vol. II, pp. 456-473 ; E. D. 
Fite, The Presidential Campaign of i860, pp. 11 7-13 1 ; McMaster, Vol. 
VIII, pp. 452-457 ; The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, 
pp. 599, 616; MuRAT Halstead, Caucuscs of i860, pp. 141-154; Edward 
Stanwood, History of the Presidency, pp. 290-297. 

5. The Southern Argument for Secession : A. P. Upshur, The Na- 
ture of the Federal Government (The South in the Building of the 
Nation, Vol. IV, pp. 466-486, 499, 500) ; Jefferson Davis, The Rise and 
Fall of the Confederate Government, Vol. I, Part I ; U. B. Phillips, 
Georgia and States Rights (American Historical Association Reports, 
1901) ; T. R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery ; Alex- 
ander H. Stephens, The War between the States, Vol. I. pp. 17-49, 45Q- 
539 ; C. F. Adams, The Constitutional Ethics of Secession (Massachusetts 
Historical Society, Proceedings, Series II, Vol. XVII, pp. 99 f.) ; Hart, 
Contemporaries, Vol. IV, Nos. 54, 55 ; J. L. M. Curry, The Southern 
States considered in their Relations to the Constitution of the United States 
and to the Resulting Union; F. E. Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War, 
pp. 37-53 (Calhoun's doctrines) ; E. A. Pollard, The Lost Cause, chap. i. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



zxiii 



CHAPTER X 
THE CIVIL WAR 

The most satisfactory story of the Civil War, in point of accuracy, fair- 
ness, and sustained interest, is contained in the third, fourth, and fifth 
volumes of J. F. Rhodes's History of the United States from the Com' 
promise of 1850 (The Macmillan Company). Rhodes's account is criti- 
cized in some respects by Charles F. Adams, in a pamphlet entitled Some 
Phases of the Civil War. A masterly history of the war is presented in Ed- 
ward Channing's History of the United States, Vol. VI, The War for South- 
ern Independence (The Macmillan Company) , Two volumes in the American 
Nation Series by J. H. Hosmer — The Appeal to Arm^ and The Outcome 
of the Civil War (Harper & Brothers) — cover the ground completely and 
are provided with excellent bibliographies. In briefer form the period is 
treated in N. W. Stephenson's Abraham Lincoln and the Union and in the 
Day of the Confederacy, and in W. Wood's Captains of the Civil War 
(Yale University Press) ; also in F. L. Paxson's Civil War (Henry Holt 
and Company). For more detailed mihtary treatments, with excellent 
maps, see Wood and Edmonds's Civil War in the United States (G. P. 
Putnam's Sons) and J. Formsby's American Civil War (Charles Scrib- 
ner's Sons). Almost all the important commanders in the war — Grant, 
McClellan, Sheridan, Sherman, Longstreet, etc., with the notable excep- 
tion of Robert E. Lee — left memoirs. These personal accounts are subject 
to the temptation of "coloring" which besets all memoirs, and the careful 
student must check them by reference to the great work of the United 
States government entitled Official Records of the Union and Confederate 
Armies and Navies in over one hundred and fifty volumes. This work is 
described in Hosmer's Outcome of the Civil War, pp. 314-318. The Cam- 
paigns of the Civil War (13 vols.) (Charles Scribner's Sons) and Battles 
and Leaders of the Civil War (4 vols., ed. Johnson and Buell) (The Cen- 
tury Co.) are valuable studies of the chief campaigns, written for the most 
part by participants. A similar work from Southern sources is C. A. Evans's 
Confederate History (12 vols.) (The Confederate PubHshing Co.). To the 
biographies of Lincoln, Seward, Davis, and Stephens cited under a former 
chapter should be added G. C. Gorham's Life and Public Services of Edwin 
M. Stanton (Houghton Mifflin Company), Vol. I; G. F. R. Henderson's 
Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (2 vols.) (Longmans, 
Green & Co.); H. A. White's Robert E. Lee and the Southern Confed- 
eracy (G. P. Putnam's Sons); the Diary of Gideon Welles (Houghton 
Mifflin Company), chaps, i-xxx; A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1860-1865 (ed. 
W. C. Ford) (Houghton Mifflin Company) ; and R. E. Lee's Dispatches, 
1862-186 5, to Jefferson Davis (ed. W. J. de Renne) (G. P. Putnam's Sons). 



xxiv THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

The constitutional aspects of the war are well treated, from the North- 
ern point of view, in J. W, Burgess's Civil War and the Constitution 
(2 vols.) (Charles Scribner's Sons) and Wilham Whiting's War Powers 
of the President (J, L. Shorey, Boston); and, from the Southern point 
of view, in N. W. Stephenson's Day of the Confederacy (Yale Univer- 
sity Press) and J. L. M. Curry's Govermnent of the Confederate States 
(Richmond). The diplomatic history is admirably treated in Rhodes's 
History, to which may be added Montague Bernard's Historical Ac- 
count of the Neutrality of Great Britain during the American Civil War 
(Longmans, Green & Co.), C. F. Adams's Studies Military and Diplomatic 
(The Macmillan Company), and J. M. Callahan's Diplomatic History of 
the Southern Confederacy (Baltimore). E. D. Fite's Social and Industrial 
Conditions in the North during the Civil War (The Macmillan Company) 
and J. C. Schwab's Confederate States of America, 1861-1865 (Yale Uni- 
versity Press) are valuable studies. A useful Hst of personal narratives 
illustrating social conditions during the war may be found in J. K. Hosmer's 
Outcome of the Civil War, pp. 325-327. For naval operations see E. S. 
Maclay's History of the U?iited States Navy (3 vols.) (D. Appleton and 
Company) and J. T. Scharf's History of the Confederate States Navy 
(New York). Important political documents of the war period are printed 
in MacDonald's Docunmitary Source Book, Nos. 1 16-142, and the social 
hfe of the period is illustrated by extracts printed in Hart's Contemporaries, 
Vol. IV, Nos. 70-140. 

Topics for Research 

1. The Blockade: A. Roberts (A. C. Hobart), Never Caught] E. S. 
Maclay, History of the United States Navy, Vol. II, pp. 225-281 ; T. E. 
Taylor, Running the Blockade ; H. L. Wait, The Blockade of the Con- 
federacy (Century Magazine, Vol. XXXIV, pp. 914-928); John Wilkin- 
son, The Narrative of a Blockade Runner ; George C. Eggleston, History 
of the Confederate War, Vol. I, pp. 261-267 ; J. R. Soley, The Blockade 
and the Cruisers', J. F. Rhodes, History of the United States, Vol. V, 
pp. 396-420. 

2. War Finance: T. E. Burton, John Sherman (American Statesmen, 
Series II), pp. 87-141; John Sherman, Recollections, Vol. I, chaps, xii, 
xiii; D. R. Dewey, Financial History of the United States, chaps, xii, 
xiii; Hugh McCulloch, Men and Measures of Half a Century, chaps, 
xv-xvii; E. P. Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, Vol. I, chaps, iv-xii; J. W. 
Shuckers, The Life of Salmon P. Chase, chaps, xxx, xxxvii-xxxix ; A. M. 
Davis, Origin of the National Banking System ; Wesley C. Mitchell, 
History of the Greenbacks ; J. C. Schwab, The Confederate States of 
America; American Annual Cyclopcedia, pp. 295-314 (1861), pp. 452- 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



XXV 



474 (1862), pp. 290-304, 394-412 (1863), pp. 371-377 (1864), pp. 335- 
350 (1865). 

3. The Trent Affair : J. F. Rhodes, History of the United States, 
Vol. Ill, pp. 520-543 ; E. L. Pierce, Memoirs and Letters of Charles Sum- 
ner, Vol. IV, pp. 50-62; The Works of Charles Sumner, Vol. VI, pp. 162- 
168, 219-242 ; Frederic Bancroft, Life of Seward, Vol. II, pp. 223-253 ; 
Lord Newton, Lord Lyons, a Record of British Diplomacy, Vol. I, pp. 
55-62 ; C. F. Adams, The Trent Affair (Massachusetts Historical Society, 
Proceedings, Vol. XLV, pp. 148-157); A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861- 
1865 (ed. W. C. Ford), Vol. I, pp. 75, 82, 83, 86, 89, 90, 93, 114. 

4. Martial Law and Habeas Corpus : L. G. Tyler, The Suspension of 
Habeas Corpus {Political Science Quarterly, Vol. Ill, p. 454) ; Allen 
Johnson, Readings in American Constitutional History, chap, lii, Nos. 
155-160; Joel Parker, Constitutional Law with Reference to the Present 
Condition of the United States; Samuel Tyler, Roger B. Taney, chap, 
vi; Horace Binney, The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus; 
A. G. Fisher, The Trial of the Constitution; J. A. Marshall, The 
American Bastille ; R. C. Hurd, A Treatise on Habeas Corpus ; Edward 
McPherson, History of the Rebellion, pp. 153-195; American Annual 
Cyclopcedia, pp. 508-515 (1862), pp. 233-258, 469-491 (1863), pp. 421- 
425 (1864), pp. 414-421 (1865). 

5. Life in the South : D. R. Goodle, Resources and Industrial Con- 
dition of the Southern States {Report of the United States Department 
of Agriculture, 1865), pp. no ff.; J. B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary ; 
Mary A. H. Gay, Life in Dixie during the War; Mrs. Roger A. Pryor, 
Reminiscences of Peace and War, chaps, ix-xxvi ; David Dodge, The Cave 
Dwellers of the Confederacy {Atlantic Monthly, Vol. LVIII, pp. 514- 
521); J. K. HosMER, The Outcome of the Civil War, pp. 269-289; 
W. L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, Parts I, II; 
Sarah L. Jones, Life in the South \ Mary B. Chestnut, Diary from 
Dixie. 



INDEX 



Aberdeen, Lord, 417 

Abolitionists, 380, sSSjf., 397^-, 532, 598 

Acts of Trade, 42, 61 

Adams, Charles Francis, 615 n., 618 

Adams, Henry, 238, 253 n., 346 n., 
5S8n.2,58in.i 

Adams, John, and American Revolution, 
66, 77 n., 99, 103 ; on national govern- 
ment, 108 n., 109; minister to Great 
Britain, 121, 124, 128; on the Consti- 
tution, 134, i44n.; vice president, 
147, 151; on the "people," 165; re- 
lations with France, i8of,; president, 
i89f. 

Adams, John Quincy, 141 n,, 239; min- 
isterto Russia, 253, 275 ; expansionist, 
298; relations with Spain, 302!.; on 
Missouri Compromise, 3i6f.; on 
Monroe Doctrine, 324f.; in election 
of 1824, 33 if.; character, 334 ; policy, 
337 f.; in election of 1828, 345; on 
tariff, 37of,; and slavery, 378, 390, 
397; on Texas, 413 f. 

Adams, Samuel, 62, 71, 75 

Alabama, the, 618 and n. 

Albany Congress, 49, 109, 113 

"Albany Regency," 335 

Alexander I, Czar, 275, 322 f. 

Alien and Sedition Acts, 191 f. 

Amendment, Twelfth, 2oon.; Thir- 
teenth, 597 f. 

American Antislavery Society, 388 

American Revolution, 55 f . 

"American System," 343, 370 

Ames, Fisher, 152, 179n.2, 182, 185 

Amherst, General Jeffrey, 50 

Amiens, Peace of, 215, 232 

Ampudia, General, 424 

Anabaptists, 3 

Anderson, Major Robert, S24f., S4if., 
548, 620 

Andrew, Governor John A,, 545 
Andros, Sir Edmund, 25 f., 31,37, 42 
Annapolis Convention, 136 f . 
Antietam, battle of, 571 f. 
Anti-Federalists, 162 f, 



Anti-Masons, 361 and n. 

Anti-Nebraska men, 489! 

" Appeal of the Independent Democrats," 

485 

Appomattox, surrender at, 591 

Aranda, Count, 125 

Armada, Spanish, 6 

"Armed neutrality," 96 

Arnold, Benedict, 91, 96 

Aroostook War, 409 f. 

Articles of Confederation, 91, iiof., 

ii5f., i3of. 
Ashburton, Lord, 411 f., 422 
" Asiento," the, 311 
Assemblies, colonial, 40, 42, 45 
" Association," the American, 72 
"Assumption," 155 
Astor, J. J., 305 
Atchison, D. R., 488 n, 
Atlanta, capture of, 588 
Austerlitz, battle of, 226, 234 
Austria, 459 f. 

Bainbridge, Captain, 264 

Baltimore, city of, 545, 547 

Baltimore, Lord, 12, 18, 22 andn., 2 7n. 

Bancroft, Archbishop, 1 1 n. i 

Bancroft, George, 133 n. 

Bank, National (first), i58f. 

Bank, National (second), 284 f., 307 f., 

3S8f., 362 f., 382 f., 404f. 
Banks, state, 285 n., 607 n. 
Banks, General N. P., 565 f. 
Barbary States, 128, 2iof. 
Barbe-Marbois, 215 
Barclay, Captain, 268 
" Barnburners," 441 
Barron, Captain, 231 
Bates, Edward, 521, 541 andn. 2 
" Battle of the Maps," 41 1 n. 
Bayard, Thomas, 275 
Bayonne Decree, 247 
Bazaine, Marechal, 619 
Bear Flag, 428 and n. 
Beard, Charles A., i44n., 163 n., i66n.3, 

i99n., 20in.i 



xxviii 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Beauregard, General P. G. T., 543, 546, 

552 f., 560 
Bedford, Gunning, 140 
Beecher, H. W., 532 
Beer, G. L., 3on.i 
Bell, John, 403, 520 
Benjamin, J. P., 574, 602 f . 
Benton, T. H., 304 and n., 337 n., 340, 

3S8f ., 374n. i, 385 n., 438!., 444, 488n. 
" Benton's Mint Drops," 386 
Berkeley, Governor William, 16, 24n. 
Berlin Decree, 235, 238 
Biddle, Nicholas, 359f ., 363 f ., 382, 386 
Bienville, Celeron de, 47 
" Biglow Papers," 434 
Birney, James G., 4igi. 
Black, Jeremiah W., 524, 527 
Black Rock, raid, 263 
Black Warrior affair, 464 f. 
" Bladensburg races," 272 
Blaine, James G., 492, 595 n. 
Blair, Francis P., Jr., 548 
Blair, James, 151 

Blair, Montgomery, 501 n., 541 and n. 2, 

596f., 602 
Blennerhassett, H., 229 
Blockade of South, 545f., 562 f., 574, 

610 

Board of Trade, 44 
Bolivar, Simon, 339 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 183 f., 213, 226, 
232, 235, 245, 247f., 252 f., 27on., 
276, 32lf. 

Bonus bill, 297 f. 

Boone, Daniel, 104, 113 

Booth, John Wilkes, 620 

Boscawen, Admiral, 61 

"Boston Massacre," 68 

"Boston Tea Party ," 69 f. 

Bovay, E. A., 491 

Braddock's defeat, 48 

Bragg, General Braxton, 571, 573, 582!. 

Brandywine Creek, battle of, 91 

Breckinridge, John, 194 

Breckinridge, J. C, 497, 520 

Brock, General Isaac, 262 

Brooklyn Heights, battle of, 84 

Brooks, Preston S., 496 

Brougham, Lord, 285, 416 

Brown, General Jacob, 269f., 287 

Brown, John, 496, Si5f. 

Brown, Governor Joseph E., 574, 601 

Bryant, W. C, 171 n. 

Bryce, James, 528 

Buchanan, James, and Ostend Mani- 



festo, 464; minister to England, 467; 
nominated 1856,497 ; president, 500 f., 
indecision, 524f.; change of spirit, 
545 

Buckner, General Simon B., 558 
Buell, General Don Carlos, 557, 573 
Buena Vista, battle of, 43 1 f . 
Buford, Major, 495 
Bullock, James, 617 f. 
Bull Run, battle of (first) , 553 f . 
Bull Run, battle of (second) , 569 f. 
Bulwer, Sir Henry L., 461 f. 
Burgess, J. W., 107, 137 n., 390, 489 
Burgesses, House of, 13 
Burgoyne, General John, 90 f. 
Burke, Edmund, 58 f., 64, 67, 81 n. 
Burnside, General A. E., 572 and n. 2 
Burr, Aaron, i98f., 222, 224, 228f., 
23of. 

Butler, A. P., 444, 495 f. 
Butler, General B, F., 554, 561 

Cabinet, i5of. 

Cable, Atlantic, 275, 530 

Cabot, John, 21 

Cadore, Due de, 247 f . 

Calhoun, John C, as a nationalist, 249, 
283f., 287, 296f.; and Jackson, 30if., 
354f.; as Secretary of War, 341; as 
vice president, 342, 353; opposes 
tariff, 345 353, 369; on nullifica- 
tion, 3 73 ; on abolitionists, 389, 398 f. ; 
relations with Texas, 417, 419; on 
Wilmot Proviso, 444; on Com- 
promise of 1850, 449 f.; and Nash- 
ville convention, 454; on slavery, 
539 

California, 427 f., 433, 444f., 448f., 454 
Callender, G.S., i3in., i6in. 
Calvinists of Rhine, 3 
Cameron, Simon, 541 n. 2, 547, 556, 602 
Canada, French, 45 f., 54; and War of 

1812, 259f.; in 1837, 396f. 
Canning, George, 102, 238f., 241, 245, 

256, 324, 326 
Canton, 131 

Carlton, Sir Guy, 99, 102 
Carmarthen, Lord, 121, 124 
Caroline affair, 397, 409 f. 
Cass, Lewis, 410, 441 f. 446, 458, 503, 
527n. 

Castlereagh, Lord, 256, 275, 277 
Cedar Creek, battle of, 588 
Census of 1850, 467 f. 
Central America, 462 f . 



INDEX 



xxix 



Cerro Gordo, battle of, 432 

Champlain, 3611. 

Chancellorsville, battle of, 575 

Channing, Edward, 2911.3, 4211.1, 
i29n.2, i3in., 186, 217 

Charles I, King, 10, 23 f. 

Charles II, King, 9, 11, 14, 24f,, 56 

Charleston, 93 f., 5i9f., 524!, 543 f., 620 

Chase, Salmon P., on Compromise of 
1850, 453 ; in convention of i860, 
521; Secretary of the Treasury, 534, 
541 and n.2, 558; and war finance, 
576 and n., 584, 605 f. 

Chase, Samuel, 78, 114, 211, 225 

Chatham, see Pitt 

Chattanooga, 574, 582 f. 

Cherbourg, battle of, 618 

Cherokees, 340 f. 

Chesapeake affair, 231 f., 239, 250 

Chesapeake defeated, 267 

Chesterfield, Lord, 49, 51 

Cheves, Langdon, 249, 329, 490 

Chickamauga, battle of, 582 

Chippewa, battle of, 270 

Choate, Ruf us, 500 

Choiseulj 54 

Christian Commission, 611 

Clarendon, Lord, 25 

Clark, Daniel, 229 

Clark, George Rogers, loon.i, 126 

Clark, William, 2 2 1 f . 

Clay, Henry, and War of 1812, 249, 
252, 260; at Ghent, 276; on National 
Bank, 284, 358, 363, 385, 404f.; op- 
poses treaty of 1819 with Spain, 304 
and n.; on Missouri Compromise, 
316, 3i8n,; on Monroe Doctrine, 
322 f.; in campaign of 1824, 327, 
330 f.; Secretary of State, 333 f., 
338 f.; in campaign of 1832, 362 f.; 
compromise of 1833, 373; on abo- 
lition, 398f.; and Harrison, 399,403; 
and Tyler, 404f., 407; in campaign 
of 1844, 418 f.; and Compromise of 
1850, 447 f., 453, 456; death, 458 

Clayton, J. M., 461 f. 

Clayton Compromise, 440 

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 462 

Clinton, DeWitt, 266 

Clinton, George, 119 

Clinton, Sir Henry, 84, 90 f., 93, 96, 98 

Cobb, Howell, 316, 447, 503 f., 527 n. 

Cochrane, Admiral, 272 

Colbert, 3on.i, 45 

Cold Harbor, battle of, 587 and n. 



Collins, E. L., 478 and n. I 
Colombia, 323, 338, 461 
Columbia, South Carolina, 590 
Columbia River, i6on.2, 221 
Commerce, of United States, 100, 173 

and n., 174, 232f., 236, 241, 248, 256, 

266f., 285, 29on.i, 477f. 
Committees of Correspondence, 70 n., 71 
Committees of Safety, 71 
" Common Sense," 81 
Compromise, Missouri, 309 f. 
Compromise of 1833, 374f. 
Compromise of 1850, 443 f ., 466 
Conciliatory Act, 92 
Concord, battle at, 75 
Confederacy, Southern, 529, 535 and n., 

6iof. 

Confiscation Act, 554, 593 f . 
Congress, First Continental, 71 f. 
Congress, Second Continental, 74 f., 89, 
107 

Congress of Vienna, 277, 322 
Connor, Commodore, 430 
Conscription Act, Southern, 574; North- 
ern, S7sf. 

Constitution of the United States, 112, 

i32f., i38f., i4if., i45f. 
Constitutional Union Party, 520 
Continental System, 253, 275 
" Contraband of war," 554n.2 
Contreras, battle of, 432 
Cooper, Peter, 381 
Cooper, Thomas, 343 
Cooper Union speech, Si8f. 
Copenhagen, 240 
" Copperheads," 575 f. 
Corinth, 560 

Cornwallis, General, 85, 89 f ., 93 f ., 96 f ., 
98 

" Corrupt bargain," 333 

Corwin, Thomas, 446 

Cotton, John, 20 and n. 

Cotton, production and trade, 287, 295, 

314 and n., 472f., 55in.i, 562f., 609 

and n., 610 
"Cotton is King," 473, 513 
Coureurs de bois, 34 
Cowpens, battle of, 96 
Crawford, W. H., 285, 288, 331 f., 337 n., 

354f. 
Creeks, 273, 34of. 
Creole affair, 410 f. 
" Crime against Kansas," 495 
Crimean War, 465 
Crittenden, Colonel, 463 



XXX 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Crittenden, J. J., 404, 406 

Crittenden Compromise, 525 f., 528, 537 

Cromwell, Oliver, 13 f ., 23 f ., 31 

Cuba, 339, 462 f., 514 

Cumberland Road, 257, 321 

Cunard, Samuel, 477 f. 

Currency, in Revolution, 96; Conti- 
nental, i2of.; in Jackson's day, 386; 
in Civil War, 603 f. 

Curtis, Justice, 502 

Dallas, Alexander J., 285, 29on.2 

Dartmouth, Lord, 79, 311 

Dartmouth College case, 306 f. 

Davies, William, 183, 185 

Davis, David, 521 

Davis, Henry Winter, 599, 6i9n.i 

Davis, Jefferson, Secretary of War, 467 ; 
on railroads, 480; in Senate, 504; 
resolutions of i860, 518; on seces- 
sion, 533; as president, 535, 545, 553, 
558, 56s, 574, 587; on Union, 590; 
escape of, 591; opposition to, 6oof. 

Davis- Wade Bill, 599 f. 

Dearborn, General Henry, 206, 257, 263, 
267 

De Bow, quoted, 473 n. 3, 476 and n., 
513,515 

Debt, colonial, 60 and n.; in 1783, 118 
and n.; in 1789, 154 f.; extinguished, 
391; of states, 410, 479 f.; in Civil 
War, 606 f. 

Debtors' prisons, 380 

Decatur, Stephen, 211, 264 

Declaration of Independence, 7 if., 80 
and n., 107, 123 

Declaratory Act, 65 

De Grasse, Admiral, 97, 102 

Democracy, 348 f., 402 

Denonville, Governor, 37 and n. 

D'Estaing, Admiral, 97 n. 

Detroit, surrendered, 262; recovered, 
268 

Dew, Thomas, 391 and n. 

Dickinson, John, 76, no, 139 

Dinwiddle, Governor, 2 in., 45 

Directory, French, 179 

Distribution Act, 392, 395 n. 

Dixon, Archibald, 484 

Dodd, W.E., quoted, 450, 4S6n., 473n. 2 

Dodge, A. C, 483 

Donelson, A. J., 420 f. 

Dongan, Governor Thomas, 21 n., 36 f. 

Doniphan, Colonel, 426f. 

Dorchester, Lord, 173 



Dorr, Thomas, 349 n. 2 

Douglas, Stephen A., 483 f.; on Kansas, 
498 f.; and Buchanan, 504 f.; and 
Lincoln, 507 f.; on slave trade, 5i4f.,- 
in campaign of i860, Sigi.; on 
South, 522, 545 

Draft riots, 584, 599 n.i 

Drake, Francis, 6 

Dred Scott case, 501 f ., 52 1 n 

Duane, William, 224, 383 

Du Barras, 98 

Dunmore, Governor, 109 

Duquesne, Fort, 50 

Dutch on Hudson, 3, 21 n. 

Dwight, Timothy, 198, 292 

D'Yrujo, 229 

Early, General Jubal, 587 f . 
Eaton, John, 354n. 
Edict of Nantes, 3 

Education, in colonies, 15 f.; North and 
South, 474f. 

" Elastic clause," 160 

Election, of 1792, 166, i67n.i; of 1796, 
188; of 1800, 185, 195 f., 202 f.; of 
1812, 266; of 1816, 288; of 1824, 
33of.; of 1828, 345; of 1832, 36s; 
of 1836, 393 ; of 1840, 401 ; of 1844, 
4i9f.; of 1848, 442; of 1852, 458f.; 
of 1856, 500; of i860, 522 f.; of 1864, 
588 

Elizabeth, Queen, 6f., 10 f. 
Ellmaker, Amos, 361 
Ellsworth, Oliver, 139, 151, 183 
Emancipation, compensated, 594 
Emancipation Proclamation, 572 n.i, 
595 f. 

Embargo, of 1794, 174; of 1808, 240 f. 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 489 
Emigrant Aid Society, 493 
English Bill, 506 f. 

" Enumerated commodities," 44 and n. 
Eppes, John, 228n, 

"Era of good feelings," 289 f., 299, 320, 
347 

Ericsson, John, 563 
Erie Canal, 329, 337 
Erlanger loan, 609 f. 
Erskine, David, 245 
Essex case, 233 
Eutaw Springs, battle of, 96 
Everett, Edward, 351, 487, 520 
Ewell, General, 576 

Ewing, Secretary of the Treasury, 404, 
40O 



INDEX 



xxxi 



Excise of 1 79 1, 209 
"Exposition and Protest," 345 f. 

Fair Oaks, battle of, 565 

Fallen Timbers, battle of, 177 

" Family Compact," 172 n. 

Faneuil, Peter, 43 

Farewell Address, 123, 188 

Farragut, Admiral D. G., 561, 587 

"Federalist, The," 143 

Federalists, 162, 175, 202 f., 241 f. 

Ferguson, Colonel, 94 

Field, Roswell, 501 n. 

"Fifty-four forty or fight," 437 

Fillmore, Millard, 454, 458, 498, 500 

Finances, Confederate, 555 n., 604, 608 f. 

Finances, Northern, S76n., 584, 603 f . 

Fisheries, 305 n. 

Fite, E. D., quoted, 611 f. 

Five Forks, battle of, 591 

"Five-twenties," 605 

Fletcher vs. Peck, 228 

Flint, Timothy, 299, 309 

Florida, 59, 99, 105, 272, 300 f., 303 f., 

399, 443 n., 446 
Florida, the, 617 
Florida-Blanca, 126 
Floyd, James, 504, 527 n.i 
Floyd, John, 371 
Foote,A.H.,35S,ss7f.,s6i 
Forbes, General, 50 
"Force Bill," of i833,374f. 
Forney, J. W., 505 
Forster, W. E.,6i8 
Forsythe, John, 397, 532 
Fort Donelson, 557 f. 
Fort Duquesne, 50 
Fort Henry, 557 
Fort Jackson, 273 
Fort Lee, 85 
Fort McHenry, 272 
Fort Mimms, 273 
Fort St. Marks, 301 
Fort St. Philip, 273 
Fort Washington, 85 
"Forty-niners," 444f. 
Fouche, 231 n. 
Fox, C. J., 81 n., 23s 
Fox, G. V.,5S4n. 

France, aid from, 83, 92 f., 9711., 166; 

war with, in 1798, 181 f. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 40, 65, 77 and n., 

86n., 92, 99, 105, 109, 113) 124, 132, 

i39fv 

Franklin, state of, 127 



Frederick the Great, 90 
Fredericksburg, battle of,572n.,573,575 
Freeman's Farm, battle of, 91 
"Freeport Doctrine," 5iof. 
Free-Soilers, 441 f ., 499 
Fremont, J. C, 428 f., 497 f., 556, 566, 
594 

French claims, 248n., 379 
French Revolution ,i6o,i69f.,i83,32if. 
Frenchtown, battle of, 267 
Freneau, Philip, i64f. 
Fries, John, 196 
Frontenac, Count, 36 
Fugitive Slave Law, of 1793, 312; of 
1850,448,454,457,467 

Gadsden Purchase, 480 

"Gag rule," 390 

Gage, Governor, 70, 72, 75 

Gaines, General, 341 

Gaines's Mill, battle of, 566 

Gallatin, Albert, 206 f., 241, 244, 248, 

256f., 266,275f. 
Galloway, Joseph, 72 
Gardoqui, 126 

Garrison, William Lloyd, 380, 388, 620 

Gates, General Horatio, 91 

Geary, J. W., 499, 504 

Genet, Edmond, i7of., 175 

George HI, 41, 51, 56f., 67, 74f., 80, 

89n.,98, 129, 255f., 290 
Georgia, 42 n. 2, 94, 114, 227, 34of. 
Germantown, 3 ; battle of, 91 
Gerry, Elbridge, 180 
Gettysburg, battle of, 577 f. 
Ghent, Treaty of, 271, 275 
Gibraltar, 99 
Gillespie, Lieutenant, 428 
Gist, Christopher, 47 
Gist, Governor, 522 
Gladstone, W. E., 133 
Godoy, Don Manuel, 177 
Gold, discovery, 444 f., 471 
" Gold pills," 58 
Granger, Gideon, 206 
Grant, Sir William, 233 
Grant, General U.S., 557 f., 579f., 583, 

586f., 591 
Graves, Admiral, 98 
Gray, Captain Robert, i6on.2,305 
Great Britain, and colonies, 20 f., 55 f., 

J03; and United States, 12 if., 172 f., 

285, 329; and Confederacy, 6i4f. 
Greeley, Horace, 489, 491, 507, 521, 533, 

598n.2 



xxxii 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Greenbacks, 605 f. 
Grenville, George, 57 f., 62 f., 65 
Greytown, bombarded, 461 
Grundy, Felix, 249, 372, 392 n. 
Guadalupe-Hidalgo, treaty of, 433 
Guadeloupe, 54 

Habeas Corpus, 13, 592f., 598 n.i, 601 f. 
"Hail Columbia," 181 
Hale, J. P., 442 

Halleck, General W. H., 556!., 569 
Hamilton, Alexander, and the Consti- 
tution, 135, 137, 143; Secretary of 
the Treasury, 150, i52f., i7if.; de- 
fends Jay's Treaty, 176; and French 
war, 181 f.; and Whisky Rebellion, 
i86f.; and Adams, 189, 191, I92n., 
197, 199; and Burr, 200, 222 
Hamilton, Governor, of South Carolina, 

371,373 

Hammond, Senator, 513, 5i7f. 

Hampton, General Wade, 267 

Hampton Roads, battle of, 563 f.; con- 
ference at, 589 f. 

Hancock, John, 43, 6on. 

Hancock, General W. S., 376, 577f. 

Harlem Heights, battle of, 85 

Harpers Ferry, 516, 571 

Harrisburg convention, of 1827, 343; 
of 1839, 399 

Harrison, Benjamin, 142 

Harrison, General W. H., 250, 268, 299, 

393,399,403 
Hartford Convention, 2 79f. 
"Hartford wits," 136 
Harvard College, 15,378 
Harvey, John, 14 
Hawkes, Admiral, 61 
Hay, George, 230, 264 
Hayne, Robert Y., 340, 345, 355 f-, 373 
Helper,H. R., 517 

Henry, Patrick. 57, 59n.i, 64, loon., 
108, i4if., i63n.i, 3i2n. 

Hessians, 89 

Hicks, Governor, of Maryland, 547 

Hill, General A. P., 576 

Hill, General D.H., 571 

Hill, Isaac, 353,357 

Hillsborough, Lord, 23 

Hise, Elijah, 461 

Hoar, G. F., 132 

Holy Alliance, 322 

Homestead Bill, 515 

Hood, General J. B., 589 

Hooker, General Joseph, 575, 577, 5 83 



Hooker, Thomas, 2on-, 
Hopkinson, Joseph, 181 
Houston, General Samuel, 412 f. 
Howe, General George, 86 
Howe, Lord Richard, 84 
Howe, General William, 83 f., 88 and n., 
90 f. 

Hudson, campaign for, 90 f. 
Huelsemann, Chevalier, 459 
Huguenots, 3 
Hull, Isaac, 264 

Hull, General William, 257, 26of. 

Hungary, 459 f. 

"Hunkers," 441 

Hunt, Mrs. R. L., 534!. 

Hunter, General, 594n. 

Hutchinson, Thomas, 55, 64, 66, 70, 74n. 

Ide, William B., 428 
Illinois admitted, 299 
Immigration, 5, 468!., 530 
"Impending Crisis, The," 517 
Impressment, 237 f., 254f., 277 n. 
Income tax, 605 

Independent Treasury, 395 f ., 405, 443 n. 
Indiana admitted, 299 
Industrial Revolution, 469 
Internal Improvements, 321 and n.2, 
337 

Intolerable Acts, 70, 72, 92 
Iowa admitted, 443 n. 
Ireland, 60, 79n., 469f. 
Iroquois, 36n., 114 
"Irrepressible Conflict, The," 521 
Izard, General George, 269 

Jackson, Andrew, senator, 189; and 
Burr, 229; in War of 1812, 269, 
2 73f., 287; and Indians, 300 f.; on 
Texas, 304n.; campaign of 1824, 
330 f-, 33511.; campaign of 1828, 345; 
presidency, 348 f.; character, 351 f., 
365 f.; and Calhoun, 354f.; and 
Bank, 358f., 363 f.; reelected in 1832, 
365; and nullification, 368n., 369f., 
372; second term, 377 f.; foreign 
affairs, 378f.; censured, 384; op- 
position to, 387 ; end of era, 402 ; on 
Texas, 413 

Jackson, General T. J. ("Stonewall"), 
533f.,569f., 575 

Jackson, Michigan, 491 

Jackson, Mississippi, 579 

"Jackson's Yellow Boys," 386 

James I, if., 7f., 22 



INDEX 



xxxiii 



James II, iin.i 

Jameson, J. F., 141 n. 

Jay, John, yyn., 99, 119, 126, 129, 143, 
ISO, 199,306 

Jay-Gardoqui treaty, 127 f. 

Jay's Treaty, of 1794, 175!., i78f., 187 f. 

Jefferson, Thomas, on grievances of 
American colonies, 58, 66 n., 70 and 
n., 72 n. I, 74, 77 n., 78; and Decla- 
ration of Independence, 80 ; on Union, 
109; on Articles of Confederation, 
110; and Western land claims, 115; 
minister at Paris, 12 if.; on Con- 
stitution, 135 ; on Washington, 149 n., 
Secretary of State, 150, 157, 169, 
326; on Bank, 159; opposes Hamil- 
ton, 165, i66n.2, 185; organizes 
Republicans, 186 f.; vice president, 
189, 193 ; and Kentucky Resolutions, 
194; elected president, 195 f., 201; 
policy, 204 f., 209 f., 212; on New 
Orleans, 2i4f.; on West Florida, 220, 
225 f., 234; reelected, 222; and 
Chesapeake affair, 239f,; criticisms 
of, 242 f.; on War of 1812, 260; on 
manufactures, 286; and Marshall, 
308; on slavery, 311, 314; ordinance 
of 1784, 312 f.; on states' rights, 337 ; 
Jeffersonian Democracy, 348f.; birth- 
day dinner of 1830, 356 f. 
-Jena, battle of, 235 

Johnson, Arthur, 88 n. i 

Johnson, H. V., 520 

Johnson, General R. M., 249, 269, 393 

Johnston, General A. S., 558 f. 

Johnston, General J. E., 552 f., 565, 

579,586,591 
Jones, John Paul, 211, 264 
Juarez, 619 

"Judas of the West," 333 
Judiciary Act, of 1789, 151, 207, 306; 
of i8oij 201, 206 

Kalm, Peter, 42, 56 and n. 

Kansas, 492 f ., 498 f ., 504 f ., 507 

Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 484 f. 

Kaskaskia, 100 n. 

Kearny, General S. W., 426 f. 

Kearsarge, the, 618 

Kendall, Amos, 384, 389 

Kenesaw Mountain, battle of, 587 

Kentucky, admitted, 313; loyalty of, 

548, 556f.; invaded, 573 
Kentucky Resolutions, 194 f. 
King, Rufus, 212, 232, 244, 288f., 316 



King's Mountain, battle of, 94 
" Know-Nothings," 470 f., 492 
Knox, Henry, 150, 152 
Kossuth, Louis, 460 

Labor, in thirties, 359f.; in Civil War, 

6l2f. 

Lafayette, Marquis de, 88, 97, 103 

Lake Champlain, battle of, 271 

Lake Erie, battle of, 2 68f. 

Lakes, Great, 481 f. 

Lamar, president of Texas, 414 

Land sales, 223, 293 

Lane, Joseph, 520 

La Salle, 36 

Latin America, 338 f. 

Laud, Archbishop, 11, 17, 73 

Laurens, Colonel John, 97 

Lawrence, Amos, 493 

Lawrence, Captain, 267 

Lawrence, Kansas, 495 

Le Boeuf, Fort, 47 

Lecky, W. E. H., quoted, 58 f., 63, 79, 83, 

148 

Le Clerc, General, 215 
Lecompton, Judge, 495, 499 
Lecompton Constitution, 504 f. 
"Lecompton Junior," 506 
Lee, Charles, 89 

Lee, Richard H., 78, 80, no, 142 

Lee, General Robert E., 516, 545 f., 

S65f., S7if., 576n., 578, 59of., 6oin. 
Lee, William, 81 
Leisler, Jacob, 38n. 
Leonard, Daniel, 70 n. 
Letcher, Governor, of Virginia, 549 
Lewis and Clark expedition, 221 and n., 

305 

Lexington, battle of, 75 
Liberator, the, 380 
Liberty party, 401 

Lincoln, Abraham, in Congress, 440; 
in convention of 1856, 498; debates 
with Douglas, 508 f.; Cooper Union 
speech, 518 f.; nominated in 1860,521 ; 
on Compromise, 526; on secession, 
53 6 f.; first inaugural, 540 f.; cabinet, 
541 and n.; call for volunteers, 544; 
and McClellan, 567 f.; opposition to, 
in 1862, S7of.; on Gettysburg, 578; 
on the freeing of the Mississippi, 
58on.; criticism of, in 1863, 584 and 
n. 2, 598 f . ; reelected, 588 ; atHampton 
Roads, 589; war powers, 592 f.; op- 
position to, in war, 598 f.; on Re- 



xxxiv 



THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



construction, 599; on the Treasury, 
608; on war relief, 612 n.; assassi- 
nation, 620; character, 620 f. 

Lincoln, General Benjamin, 94 

Lincoln, Levi, 201 n. 2, 206 

Linn Bill, 437 

Livermore, T. L., 552 

Livingston, Edward, 219, 360 

Livingston, R. R,, 213 

Locke, John, 73 

Lodge, H. C, 153 andn. 

Logan, General J. A., 589 

Longstreet, General James, 570, 576 

Lookout Mountain, battle of, 583 

Lopez expedition, 463 

Louis XIV, 3, 34, 38, 45 

Louis XVI, 83,93 

Louisburg, 50 

Louisiana, ceded to France, 213; pur- 
chased, 2i4f,, 304; admitted as state, 
2i9,298,309,3i3n.i 

Louisville, 573 

Lovejoy, Elijah, 397, 509 

Lowell, J. R., 422, 434> 45o, 452, 528, 
53of.,6isn. 

Lowndes, William, 249, 287, 330 

Lundy's Lane, battle of, 270 

Lyon, Captain Nathaniel, 548 f. 

Lyons, Lord, 6i6f. 

McClellan, General G. B., 549 and n., 

555f-, 558, 564f-, 567f., 57of., 588 
McCulloch vs. Maryland, i6on.i, 

307 

Macdonough, Thomas, 271 

McDowell, General Irvin, 553, 565 

McDuffie, George, 345, 360, 367 f. 

McKay, Donald, 477 n. 

McLane, Louis, 360, 383 

Maclay, Senator, 151 

McLean, John, 497 f ., 502 

McLean, Thomas, 197 

McLeod, Alexander, 409 

McMaster, J. B., quoted, 105 

Macon Bill No. 2, 246 f. 

Madison, James, 107 ; on Mississippi, 
127 ; work for Constitution, 129, 136, 
143; party affiliations, 163 n.i; on 
Virginia Resolutions, 194; Secretary 
of State, 206, 237, 243; president, 
244f.; and War of 1812, 25if., 254, 
27s f., 28of.; reelected, 266; on ex- 
pansion, 282 f., 296; vetos Bank bill, 
297 

Magof&n, Governor, of Kentucky, 548 



Magruder, General J. B., 564, 5671 

Mahan, Captain A. T., 281,328 

Maine admitted, 317 

Mallory Bill, 343 

Malvern Hill, battle of, 567 

Manassas, battle of, 553 f., 569 

Manufactures, in 1812, 256f.; in 1815, 
281, 28s; in 1819, 342 f., 349; in 
1850, 471 f.; in i860, 529; in Civil 
War, 612 f. 

Marbury vs. Madison, 207 

Marcy, W. L.,3Si,464f. 

Maret, 253 

Marshall, John, 117, 133, i43n., i6on,i, 

i8of., 230, 3o6f. 
Martin, Luther, 139 
Martin vs. Hunter's Lessee, 306 
Martineau, Harriet, 381 n. 
Martinique, 61 
Mason, George, 138 
Mason, Jeremiah, 359 
Mason, John Y., 464, 616 f. 
Maysville veto, 358 
Maximilian of Austria, 619 f. 
Meade, General George, 577 f. 
Mercantile theory, 27 
Merchant marine, 478 
Merry, Anthony, 229 
Metternich, 215, 459 
Mexican War, 42if., 434f. 
Mexico, 322, 412, 4i4n., 422!., 514, 

6i9f. 

"Middle passage," the, 311 
Milan Decree, 236 
Mill Spring, battle of, 557 
Minden, battle of, 50 
Minutemen, 75 
Miranda, 182 n. 

Missionary Ridge, battle of, 583 f. 
Mississippi, admission, 299 
Mississippi River, i26f., 556 f., 580 
Missouri, slavery in, 304n.; territory^ 
309 

Missouri Compromise, 309f., 3i8n.7., 

320, 483 f. 
Mobile, 273 

Mobile Bay, battle of, 587 f. 

Monitor and Virginia, battle of, 562 f. 

Monmouth, battle of, 93 

Monroe, James, 129 n.i, 137; envoy to 
France, i78f., i96f., 2i5f.; envoy to 
England, 238 ; Secretary of State, 245, 
249; and Jackson, 274, 302; elected 
president, 288; tour, 289; on internal 
improvements, 297; on Texas, 304n.; 



INDEX 



!txxV 



on Missouri Compromise, 317; re- 
elected, 321 and n. ; success, 330 

Monroe Doctrine, 322 f., 325, 328, 
46of., 615, 6i9n.i. 

Monterey, California, 427 f., 445 

Monterey, Mexico, 429 

Montgomery, Alabama, 529, 535 

Montreal, 50 f. 

Morgan, General Daniel, 573 

Morgan, William, 361 n. 

Morris, Gouverneur, 118, 141, 178 

Morris, Robert, ii8f., 153 

Morristown, 85, 89 

Morton, Governor, of Indiana, 575 

Moultrie, Fort, 84 

Mount Vernon, 137 

Moustier, Count, 152 

Murfreesboro, battle of, 573 

Murray, William Vans, 182 f . 

Napoleon I, see Bonaparte 
Napoleon III, 581 and n.2, 6i4f., 6i9f. 
Nashville, 454f., 558n.2, 574, 588 
Natchez, 127 

National Republicans, 335, 362 

Native-Americanism, 387 f ., 470 

Nat Turner's Rebellion, 391 n. 

"Natural rights," 66 and n. 

Naturalization Act, 191 

Navigation Acts, 25, 28 f., 32, 38, 43 f., 

52,67n.,378f.,477 
Navy, 207, 258, 264f., 562 f. 
Nebraska, 483 f . 
Necker, 116 
Nelson, William, 548 
Neutrality act of 1794, 171 
New England, iif., 258f., 279, 388 
New France, 45 f. 
New Granada, see Colombia 
New Mexico, 433, 440, 445 
New Orleans, 2i3f., 2 74f., 294f., 463, 

481, 561 
Newport, 93 
Niagara, 50, 263 
Nicaragua, 461, 474n. 
Nominating conventions, 360 f. 
Nonintercourse Act, of 1794, i88n.; of 

1806, 23s; of 1809, 242, 246; of 1811, 

248; of 1861,593 
Nootka Sound controversy, 169, 212 
North, Lord, 58, 69, 73, 79, 88n.i, 92, 

98, 109 

Northwest Ordinance, 13 if., 313 
Nullification, in 1798, 195; in 1832, 
367f.,37if., 37sf. 



Ohio, admission, 222!. 

Ohio valley, contest for, 47 f. 

Old Colonial System, 28, 61 

Olmstead, F. L., 48on., 539n,2 

Olney, Richard, 327 

Onis, Don Luis de, 302 f . 

Orders in Council, 235 f., 240, 251, 256, 

275, 277n. 
Oregon, 221, 3o5f., 38if., 409f., 436f., 

438n.i, 44of. 
Oreto, the, 617 
Orient, trade with, 131 
Orleans, territory of, 218 
Osgood, H. L., 20 n. 
Ostend Manifesto, 464 f. 
Otis, James, 43, 59n.i, 62f,, 66, 7711. 
Owen-Glass Act, 608 n.i 

Pacific Railroad, 480, 515 
Paine, Thomas, 72n.i, 81, 120 
Pakenham, Sir Edward, 2 74f. 
Palmer, B. M., 539n.i 
Palmerston, Lord, 422 
Palo Alto, battle of, 424 
Panama mission, 338 
Pan-American policy, 323 
Panic, of 1837, 394f.; of 1857, 512 f. 
Paris, Treaty of, 1763, 54, 56f.; 1783, 
99 f. 

Parkman, Francis, 34, 49 n. 
Parliament and colonies, 22 f., 33, 39, 

42, 52, 6sf. 
Patent Office, 472 n. 

Paterson, William, of New Jersey, 
139 

Patterson, General Robert, 552 
Peace convention of 186 1, 530 
Peel, Robert, 416 f. 
Pemberton, General J. C, 579 
Peninsular campaign, 564 f. 
Penn, Richard, 77 
Penn, William, 3, 22 n., 2711, 
Pensacola, 273, 301 
Perceval, Spencer, 253, 256 
Perry, Oliver H., 268 f. 
Perry ville, battle of, 573 
Personal Liberty Acts, 446 
Petersburg, siege of, 587, 590 
Petersham, battle of, 122 
Philippines, 20 

Pickens, Governor, of South Carolina, 

543 

Pickering, John, 211 
Pickering, Timothy, i8in., 182 f., 191, 
241, 279, 288 



xxxvi THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Pickett's Charge, 577 f. 

Pierce, Franklin, 458, 464, 466, 494f., 

498, 502 
Pierpont, F. H., 549 
Pike, Zebulon, 22in. 
Pinckney, Charles, 390 
Pinckney, C. C, i79f., 197, 222, 345 
Pinckney, Thomas, 141 and n., 177, 189, 

257 

Pinkney, William, 238, 241, 249, 315 
Pitt, Fort, 50 

Pitt, William, 40, 49, 51 f., 57!., 61, 64, 

72, 75, 79,8in. 
Plantation system, 473 f . 
"Pocket veto," 6oon. 
Poinsett, Joel R., 372 
Polk, James K., Speaker of the House, 

389; in campaign of 1844, 4i8f.; and 

Mexico, 423, 426f.; and Oregon, 

438 f.; on Cuba, 463 
Polk, General Leonidas, 5S6f. 
Polly case, 233 n. 
Pondicherry, 51 
Pontiac, 59 f. 
"Pony express," 530 
Pope, General John, 561, 569f., S7on. 
"Popular sovereignty," 445 f., 505 
Population, in 1790, i04n.i, 3i3n.2; 

in 1850, 468; in i860, 529, 550 
Porter, Admiral, 579 
Porter, General Fitz-John, 566 
Porter, Peter B., 249, 251, 263, 269, 296 
Port Hudson, 561, 580 and n. 
Port Royal, 34 n. 
Pottawatomie, 496 f. 
Prevost, Sir George, 259, 2 7of. 
Price, General Sterling, 549 
Princeton, battle of, 89 
Privateers, 2 78n. 
Proclamation Line, 60, 113 
Procter, General, 267, 269 
Public lands, 2i8n., 295, 391 
Pulaski, Count, 88 
Puritans, 11, 15 f. 
Putnam, General Israel, 84 
Pym, John, 23 

Quadruple Alliance, 322 f. 
Quakers, 17 

Quartering Act, 68n., 70 
Quebec, 34 and n., 45 f., 50, 56, 59, 72, 
86, 113 

Queenstown Heights, battle of, 263 
Quiberon, battle of, 51 
"Quids," 227 



Quincy, Josiah, 283, 298 

Quitman, Governor, of Mississippi, 457, 

463 

Quitrents, 26 n., 42 

Railroads, 380 f., 478f., 512, 582 and n. 
Raleigh letter, 418 f. 
Rambouillet Decree, 23 in., 236, 248 
Randolph, Edmund, 138, 150, 159 
Randolph, Edward, 30 and n. 
Randolph, John, 207, 224, 243, 248n., 
249, 283, 287, 317, 333, 344n., 346n. 
Ray,P.O.,488n. 
Red Cross, 611 and n.2 
Redemptioners, 9n.i 
"Red Sticks," 273 
Reeder, A. H., 493f. 
Reid, Whitelaw, 55 
Religion in colonies, 16 f. 
Removal of deposits, 383!. 
Renaissance, 5 

Republicans, of 1791, i63n.2; of 1815, 
282 ; of 1854, 49of., 498, 537 

Resaca de la Palma, battle of, 424 

Restoration of 1660, 23 

Revolution, American, 55 f. 

Revolution, English, 40 

Revolution, French, see French Revolu- 
tion 

Reynolds, General J. F,, 577 

Rhea letter, 300 and n. i 

Rhett, R. B.,457,524n. 

Rhode Island, 13, 38f., 6in.2, 65, 119, 

122, i48n., 349 and n.2 
Rhodes, J. F., quoted, 453 n., 460, 487, 

489, 50Sn., 52711.3, 538, 581, 6i4n. 
Richmond, 550, 553, 564f., 586f., 591 
Rives, W.C., 379 
Robertson, James, 104, 113 
Robinson, Charles, 494 f. 
Rochambeau, General, 96f. 
Rochefoucauld, Duke of, 16 
Rockingham, Marquis of, 65, 98 
Rodgers, Commodore, 250 
Rodney, Admiral, 100 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 150 
Rose, George, 241 

Rosecrans, General W. S., 573, 582f. 

Ross, Betsy, 309 n. 

Ross, General, 272 

Rousseau, L. H., 548 

Rule of 1756, 173, 233n., 245 

Rush, Richard, 324 

Rusk Bill, 480 

Russell, John, 254 



INDEX 



xxxvii 



Russell, Lord John, 6i6, 6i8 
Russell, Jonathan, 2 75f. 
Russell, W.H., 532 
Russia, treaty with, 323, 3270. 
Rutledge, Edward, 11 if., 306 
Rutledge, John, 86n., 151 

St. Augustine, 300 and n. 2 

St. Clair, General Arthur, 167, 174 

St. Leger, General, gof. 

Sandford, John, 501 

Sanitary Commission, 611 

San Jacinto, battle of, 412 

San Pascual, battle of, 427, 429 

Santa Anna, General, 412, 423, 430! 

Santa Fe, 426 

Santo Domingo, 215 

Saratoga, battle of, 91 

Savannah, 94, 589 

Savannah, the, 329 

Schenectady, 46 

Schuyler, General Peter, 91 

Schwab, J. C, 6ion.2 

Scotch-Irish, 2 

Scott, Dred, 501 f. 

Scott, Sir William, 23311. 

Scott, General Winfield, 269! .,397,429 f., 

432f., 458, 525, 528n.i, 532, 54on.2, 

542, 547, 552 f. 
Secession, 523f., 527, 534f. 
Sedition Act, 192 f. 
Seminole War, 300 f. 
Semmes, Captain Raphael, 618 
Sequestration Azt, 554 
Seventh-of -March speech, 450 f. 
Sewall, Samuel, 17 

Seward, W. H., governor of New York, 
395; on Texas, 436; and Tyler, 445; 
on Compromise of 1850, 453 ; on 
Kansas, 492 ; in campaign of 1856, 
497; in campaign of i860, S2of.; 
offers compromise, 538; Secretary of 
State, 541 and n.2, 542 f.; on war, 
551 n. 2; at Hampton Roads, 589; on 
Trent affair, 617; warns Napoleon 
III, 619 

Seymour, Governor Horatio, 577 
Shannon, Wilson, 494 f. 
Sharpsburg, see Antietam 
Shays's Rebellion, 122, 129, 136 
Shelburne, Lord, 99 
Shenandoah, the, 618 
Shenandoah campaign, 565 f. 
Sheridan, General Philip H., 583 f., 588, 
620 



Sherman, John, 517 

Sherman, General W. T., 579!., 586, 
588 and n.2, 59of. 

Shields, General, 566 

Shiloh, battle of, 56of. 

Shipbuilding, 476, 562 andn. 

Slade of Vermont, 388 f. 

Slave trade, abolished in 1808, 244; in 
colonies, 311; on African coast, 409; 
in the fifties, 448, 473, 5i4f.; abol- 
ished in District of Columbia, 454 

Slavery, introduction of, 310; and 
nullification, 376; in New Mexico, 
44of., 446 f.; status in 1850, 456; 
trend to lower South, 473 and n.i 
and n.2; in Lincoln-Douglas debates, 
Siof. ; and business, 53 if.; discus- 
sion of, 539; durmg Civil War, 594fo 

Slidell, John, 423 f., 514, 58in.2, 6isf. 

Sloat, Commodore, 427 

Smith, Caleb, 541 n.2 

Smith, Goldwin, 546n. 

Smith, Justin H., 423, 435n. 

Smith, General Kirby, 573, 591 

Smith, Robert, 206, 244f., 249 

Smith, Samuel, 206 

Smith, General W. F., 583 

Smythe, General Alexander, 263 

Soule, Pierre, 464 f. 

" Southern Rights " associations, 457 

Spain, explorers, 6f . ; in Revolution, 96 ; 
disputes with, in West, 124 f., i68f.; 
Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795), 177; 
sells Florida, 303 ; relations with, in 
1850-1854, 462 f. 

Sparks, Jared, 411 n. 

Specie Circular, 392 f . 

Spoils system, 353 

Spottsylvania, battle of, 587 

" Squatter sovereignty," 445 f ., 486 

Stamp Act, 62 f ., 67, 79 

Stanton, Edwin M., 527n.i, S4in.2. 
556, 582f., S9in., 620 

Star of the West, the, 529 

Stars and Bars, 546 

Star-Spangled Banner, 272 

Stockton, Commodore R. F., 428 

Stoddert, Benjamin, 181 

Story, Justice, 13 n.2 

Stephens, Alexander H., 77, 423, 485, 

514, 527, 535, 589, 601 
Stephenson, George, 381 
Steuben, Baron, 88, 129 
Stuarts, I, 9 
Siibtreasury, 395 



xxxviii THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Suffolk Resolves, 71 f. 

Sugar Act, of 1764, 62f. 

Sugar and Molasses Act, of 1733, 44, 61 

Sullivan, General John, 86 n. 

Sumner, Charles, 495 f., 615 n., 617 

Sumner, General E. V., 565 f. 

Sumter, Fort, 541 f. 

Supreme Court, 501 f., 503 

Swedes, 3 

Talleyrand, 180 f., 2i6n. 

Tallmadge, James, 310, 315, 317 

Tammany Hall, 470 

Taney, Roger B., 383 f., 502 

Tariff, of 1789, i49f.; of 1816, 286f.; 
of 1824, 331 f., 342 f.; of 1828, 344f., 
367; of 1832, 371; of 1833, 374n.2; 
reform of, 377; of 1842, 407; of 
1846, 471 n. 2, 477 ; in Civil War, 604 

Taylor, John, 193, 195 

Taylor, General Richard, 581, 591 

Taylor, Zachary,424f 429f ., 441 f ., 445, 
454 

Tea, tax on, 68f,, 92 

Tecumseh, 177, 250, 269 

Tennessee, 313, 549, 584n.i 

"Terrapin policy," 24on. 

Texas, "surrender" of, 304 and n.; ex- 
pansion toward, 381 ; annexation of, 
397 f., 412 f., 420 f.; British influence 
in, 4i4f.; in Compromise of 1850, 
448; convention in 1861, 527 

Thames, battle of, 269 

Thanksgiving Day, 581 n. 3, 584 

Thayer, Eli, 493 

Thomas, General G. H., 317, 557, 582!, 
S88f. 

Thornton, Captain, 424 

Tilghman, General, 557 

Tippecanoe, battle of , 250 

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 365 

Tompkins, Governor, of New York, 241 

Toombs, Robert, 423, 447, 498, 500, 

S4on., 543 
Topeka Constitution, 494, 498 
Tories, 79, 81 f., 86, 88, 92, 100, 102, 

I23f. 

Toussaint L'Ouverture, 215 

Townshend, Charles, 67 and n., 68 

Trafalgar, battle of, 234 

Treaty, of Paris (1763), 54, S6f.; of 
Paris (1783), 99f-, 123; Jay, i7sf., 
i78f., 187 f.; of Grenville, 177; of 
San Lorenzo, 177; of 1800 with 
Napoleon, 184; of San Ildefonso, 



213; of 1806 with England, 238; of 
Ghent, 2 77f.; of Fort Wayne, 299; 
of 1819 with Spain, 303 f.; of 1818 
with Great Britain, 305 f.; of Indian 
Springs, 341; of 1827 with Great 
Britain, 409 ; Webster-Ashburton, 
4iof.; of 1844 with Texas, 4i7f.; 
of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 433; of 1846 
with Great Britain, 438 

Trenholm, Secretary, 603 f. 

Trent affair, 556, 6i6f. 

Trenton, battle of, 89 

Trescot, W. H., 524 

Trianon Decree, 248 

Triple Alliance, 25 

Tripoli, 2iof. 

Trist, Nicholas, 432 f . 

Troup, Governor, of Georgia, 341 f. 

Tucker, Dean Josiah, 78, 116 

Turner, Nat, 380 

Tuyl, Baron, 324 

Tyler, John, 375 n., 400, 404 f., 406 f.j 

4i4f.,4i9n., 530 
Tyler, L. G., 408 

"Uncle Tom's Cabin," 517 
"Underground railroad," 446, 457 
Unionists, Southern, 490 n. 
Upshur, A., Secretary of State, 415!. 

Vallandigham, C. L., 575, 588 

Valley Forge, 88 

Valmy, battle of, 169 

Van Buren, Martin, senator, 335; 
Secretary of State, 354; vice presi- 
dent, 362, 385; nominated to English 
mission, 378; president, 382, 393; 
criticism of, 400; and Texas, 413 f.; 
in campaign of 1844, 418; nomi- 
nated in 1848, 441 f. 

Vance, Governor, of North Carolina, 
602 

Van Dorn, General, 571, S74n. 

Van Rensselaer, General Stephen, 263 

Van Tyne, C. H., quoted, 92 n., io8n. 

Vaudreuil, Marquis de, 51 

Venango, Fort, 47 

Venezuela, 327 

Vera Cruz, 432 

Vergennes, Comte de, 56,92,99,102,125 
Verplanck Bill, 374f. 
Vicksburg, 514, 561, S79f., S95 
Victor, General, 220 
Vincennes, loon.i, 127 
Virginia, the, 563 f. 



INDEX 



xxxix 



Virginia Company, 7f., 31; settlement, 

II n. I, 15, 39 
Virginia Resolutions, 194 f. 

Wade, Benjamin, 599 
Walker, L. P., 541 n. i 
Walker, Robert J., 504 f. 
Walker, William, 474 f ., 514 
Walker tariff, 471 n. 2, 477 
Wallace, General Lew, 560 
Walpole, Horace, 51 
Walpole, Robert, 57 and n, 
"War hawks," 249 

Washington, city of, 204, 271 f., 546 f., 
554 and n. i, 587 

Washington, George, in French and 
Indian War, 21 n., 47, 48 and n.; in 
Revolution, 75 f., 77 and n., 82 f ., 
84 f., 89 f., 93, 96, 97, 102 f., 106; on 
government after 1783, 117, 129 n. i, 
130; president, 123, 147 f-, 152, 1591 
on West, 127, i29n.2, 135; and Con- 
stitution, 137, 142, 144; character, 
i48f.; reelection, 167; and European 
war, 170, 175; and jay Treaty, 176; 
and French war, 181; a Federalist, 
187; retirement, 188; death, 197 

Washington, Colonel Lewis, 516 

Wayne, "Mad Anthony," 177 

Webb, J. Watson, 387 n. 

Webster, Daniel, on Northwest Ordi- 
nance, 132; on Hamilton, 160; in 
Dartmouth College case, 307 ; on 
Monroe Doctrine, 327; debate with 
Hayne, 356; on Jackson, 374 n.; in 
campaign of 1836, 393; Secretary of 
State, 403, 409; on Bank, 406; on 
Mexican War, 434 f . ; on Compromise 
of 1850, 450 f.; in campaign of 1852, 
458; Huelsemann letter, 459 f.; on 
New Orleans riot, 464 

Webster, Peletiah, 118 

Weed, Thurlow, 520, 537 and n. 

Welles, Gideon, 541 and n. 2, 616 

Wellesley, marquis of, 248 f., 253 

Western migration, 213 f., 222 f., 290 f., 
293 f-, 336, 349 f-, 355 f. 

West Florida, 219 f., 225 f ., 255 n. 2, 304 



West Indies, 44, 61, 92 n., 173 and n., 

233, 378 f. 
West Virginia, 550 
Wheeler, General Joseph, 573 
Whigs, American, 382 f., 387 f., 434 f., 

459, 489 

Whigs, English, 39 f ., 74 f ., 81 n., 97 f ., 
102 

Whisky Rebellion, 166, 174, 186 f. 

White, Hugh L., 393 

White Plains, 85, 97 

Whitman, Marcus, 436 and n. 2 

Whitney, Asa, 480 

Whitney, Eh, 176 n., 314 

Whittier, J. G., 416, 452, 501, 532 n. 2 

Wilderness, battle of, 587 

Wilkes, Captain, 616 

Wilkins Bill, 374 f. 

Wilkinson, General James, 22 9 f., 257 f., 
267 

William III (of Orange) , 22 n., 26, 38, 46 

William and Mary College, 16 

Williams, Roger, 17 

Wilmot, David, 439 f. 

Wilmot Proviso, 439 f ., 443 f., 508 

Wilson, James, 139, 151 

Winder, General, 272 

Winthrop, John, 8, 12, 17, 20 and n. 

Winthrop, R. C, 447, 531 

Wirt, William, 361 

Wise, Governor Henry A., 476 

Wolcott, Oliver, 182, 191, 192 n. 

Wolfe, General James, 50, 54, 56, 60, 86 

Women, in Civil War, 612 n. i, 613 n. i 

Wood, Fernando, 513 n., 531 f-, 545 

Woodbury, Levi, 359 

Wool, General, 426 f. 

Wright, Silas, 443 n. 

XYZ Affair, 180 f. 

Yancey, W. L., 457, 519 
Yazoo frauds, 227 f. 
York, Duke of, 25 

Yorktown, in Revolution, 93, 98; in 
Civil War, 564 f. 

Zolhcoffer, General, 557 



! I 

I i 
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